Use a group to select a collection of pupils. This may be for data entry, data analysis or both. Groups are used to hold pupils who share a common attribute / common attributes to view together. Good examples of this could include year groups, form groups, class groups, ability-based teaching groups (for example in Literacy and Numeracy), intervention groups, after school club groups or anything else that may be useful for data collection or analysis.

It is worth defining the difference between groups and Pupil Filters. Take a scenario where you want to display all boys. Pupil Filters would be the most efficient way of doing this. You may create a group comprising just boys, but that would be inefficient and hard to maintain. This is because a Pupil Filter will always look at the contextual data to pick out all the boys, but the group will only ever be the boys that you have added to the Group when it was set up. In other words, a boys group will be out of date as soon as a new boy joins the cohort but a Pupil Filter will always be up to date. For this reason, groups should not be used to record anything which is already held in a pupil's contextual data, for example, SEN, Gender, or Ethnicity. 

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Updated 10 June 2025 11:45