Every September, schools and colleges face the same challenge. Staff calendars are full of last year's meetings. Timetable calendars still show the previous year's lesson schedules. Room booking calendars carry months of historical entries. And shared departmental calendars contain events that were relevant in the last academic year but have no place in the new one.
Preparing Google Calendars for a new academic year is one of the most time-consuming IT tasks at the start of every term — unless you have a systematic approach. This guide covers everything you need to do, in the right order.
Before touching anything, make a complete list of every shared Google Calendar that needs to be reset. This typically includes:
Note the owner of each calendar and confirm you have (or can obtain) edit access before proceeding.
The cut-off date is the point before which all events will be removed. For most schools this is the last day of the previous summer term — everything before that date goes, everything after stays.
If you want to retain some transition data (for example, GCSE or A-level results day entries from the summer), choose a date that preserves those specific events.
Before clearing any calendar, consider exporting it as a backup. In Google Calendar, go to Settings → Import & Export → Export. This creates an ICS file you can store securely. If anything needs to be retrieved later, it can be re-imported.
This step is especially worthwhile for whole-school event calendars that may contain reference information.
WipeAway is designed specifically for this use case. Sign in with a Google account that has edit access to the calendars you want to clean, select the calendars, set your cut-off date, review the event count for each, and confirm. WipeAway removes all events before the cut-off date — including recurring series — while leaving the calendar structure, sharing permissions, and integrations completely intact.
For schools with many calendars and thousands of events, this process may take 15–30 minutes. Keep the browser window open until it completes.
After the deletion completes, open Google Calendar and check a sample of the cleared calendars. Confirm that:
Let staff know that shared calendars have been cleared and are ready for the new academic year. If you have a new-year briefing or INSET day, include a brief note about when new timetables and events will be added to each calendar.
Timing tip: The ideal time to run this process is the week before staff return for the new academic year — after the summer holidays but before timetables are loaded. This gives you a clear window where the calendars are empty and ready for fresh data.
Yes — WipeAway lets you select multiple calendars in a single session and process them all with the same cut-off date.
You need edit access to each calendar you want to clear. For calendars owned by other staff members, a Google Workspace super admin can grant temporary edit access via the Admin Console.
Clearing events from a shared calendar removes those events for everyone who can see it. If external parties have calendar access, consider communicating the reset before running it.