Staff planning calendars — departmental meeting calendars, CPD calendars, pastoral team calendars — accumulate significant event history over the course of a term or academic year. By the end of the year, these calendars contain months of past meetings, completed planning sessions, and events that served their purpose but now create clutter.
Clearing them properly — without losing the sharing permissions that allow the right people to see and edit them — requires a different approach from simply deleting the calendar.
Staff planning calendars are often shared with multiple members of the same department or team. The sharing configuration — who has edit access, who has view access, and which staff members are subscribed — takes time to set up correctly and represents institutional knowledge that is difficult to recreate.
If you delete and recreate a calendar to clear it, you lose all of this. Every staff member needs to be re-invited, and any integrations (such as room booking systems or MIS connections) need to be relinked.
The better approach is to clear only the events, leaving the calendar and all its configuration in place.
The calendars stay exactly as they are. The same staff members retain the same level of access. Any future events — such as INSET days or dates already planned for the next year — are untouched if they fall after your cut-off date.
A typical end-of-term clear for staff planning might include:
Whole-school event calendars that are shared with parents or the wider community may need more careful consideration — check whether historical entries are referenced anywhere before clearing them.
Tip: Run this process during the summer holidays, not at the end of term when staff are still present. This avoids accidentally removing events that teachers are still referencing, and gives you time to verify the results before the new academic year begins.
To clear a staff calendar, the Google account you sign into WipeAway with must have edit access to that calendar. If calendars are owned by individual teachers, a Workspace admin can grant temporary access via the Google Admin Console. See our guide on IT administrator access for more detail.