Managing your nursery children
Updated
If at all possible, the best way to manage nursery children in Insight is to add them into your MIS, and synchronise them along with the rest of your pupils.
This ensures a smooth transition when those pupils move from nursery into reception. Often this causes problems, since children are frequently entered into an MIS with a differently spelled name, and sometimes DoB, to what's previously been entered into Insight. If you're only assigning UPNs at this point, Insight will have no way to know which pupils are the same if any of the other details change.
It's also useful because it'll ensure that your nursery pupils end up in the right year group, of E1, E2, N1 or N2. These often cause confusion since different settings take these to mean different things. The way Insight works is based on the way most MIS' work, in which these labels refer to the number of years spent in nursery. If a pupil is due to start reception in 2026-27, then Insight will work backwards to calculate:
E1 = 2022-23
E2 = 2023-24
N1 = 2024-25
N2 = 2025-26
YR = 2026-27
Nurseries will often move pupils between rooms or groups mid-year, even though their entry to reception date hasn't changed. This can be managed by assigning your pupils to classes in Insight. You can then do all your analysis and data entry based on your classes, but children shouldn't ever need to have their year groups adjusted unless they're deferring reception by a year.
If your Nursery children are not on your MIS, you can import them using a spreadsheet, without UPNs. To account for this, Insight will not automatically archive them, as it would do for pupils in Reception or older, the next time the MIS sync runs.
