How to Reset a School Timetable in Google Calendar

At the end of each academic year, schools and colleges face the same challenge: shared Google Calendars are full of last year's timetables, lesson schedules, staff meetings, and event history. Before the new year begins, those calendars need to be cleared.

The difficulty is that deleting the calendar means losing everything — the sharing permissions that took time to configure correctly, the connections to other systems, and the structure that staff and administrators rely on.

The problem with deleting and recreating calendars

Many schools resort to deleting shared calendars at the end of the year and creating new ones. This works — but it creates significant additional work:

• Every staff member who had access needs to be re-invited
• Any integrations with other school systems need to be reconfigured
• Booking systems, room calendars, and external tools need to be reconnected
• The history of how sharing was configured is lost

For a single calendar this is manageable. For a school with multiple staff calendars, room booking calendars, and departmental calendars, it adds hours of work at the start of every academic year.

The better approach: clear events, keep calendars

The most efficient solution is to remove only the events — leaving the calendar, its structure, and all its sharing settings completely intact.

WipeAway is used by schools, colleges, and universities specifically for this purpose. It connects to Google Calendar via Google's official OAuth sign-in and lets IT administrators select the school calendars to clean, set a cut-off date, review exactly how many events will be removed, and delete all events before that date — including recurring series.

The calendars remain in place with all sharing permissions and integrations untouched. Staff see their familiar calendars, already set up correctly, ready for the new academic year.

A free trial is available at wipeaway.app/for-business — no payment card required.

Step-by-step: resetting school calendars with WipeAway

1. Identify which Google Calendars need to be cleared — staff planning, room bookings, timetables, departmental calendars
2. Decide on your cut-off date — typically the last day of the summer term
3. Sign into WipeAway using a Google account with access to the relevant calendars
4. Select the calendars you want to clean
5. Enter your cut-off date
6. Review the event count for each calendar
7. Confirm and start the deletion
8. WipeAway processes each calendar, removing all events before your cut-off date

The process runs to completion even for large calendars with thousands of events.

Frequently asked questions

Will this affect room booking systems connected to our calendars?

WipeAway removes events from the calendar. If your room booking system creates events in Google Calendar, those past events will be removed. Future bookings are unaffected if they fall after your cut-off date.

Can we do this for multiple calendars at once?

Yes. WipeAway lets you select multiple calendars and process them with the same cut-off date.

What if we accidentally delete something we needed?

Deleted events cannot be recovered from Google Calendar. We strongly recommend reviewing the event count carefully before confirming, and considering an export of calendar data via Google Calendar's export function if you need an archive of past events.

Does this work with Google Workspace for Education accounts?

Yes. WipeAway works with any Google account that has access to the relevant calendars, including Google Workspace for Education.