Year 11 vs Year 13 leavers — what's different about your school account

In the UK, "leaver" covers two distinct situations: Year 11 students finishing GCSEs and Year 13 students finishing A-levels (or IB). Both are leavers; the practical situation differs more than people realise.

Year 11 — the harder one to spot

Year 11 leavers fall into three buckets:

1. Staying at the same school for sixth form. Account usually continues on the same tenant. OneDrive, OneNote, email — all intact. No download needed for continuity, but consider whether you still want to take a Year 11 archive.
2. Moving to a different sixth form / sixth-form college. New school, new tenant, new account. Year 7–11 account is closed by the original school. You lose everything if you don't download.
3. Leaving education entirely (apprenticeship, work). Same as #2 from the data side — Year 7–11 account closes.

The trap: students in bucket 2 and 3 often assume they'll have continued access. They won't. The new sixth-form provider has no link to the old school's M365 tenant.

Year 13 — universally moving on

Year 13 leavers are simpler in one sense: everyone's account closes. There's no "but I'm staying" path that confuses things. The download decision is unambiguous.

The complication: Year 13 work is the most consequential to lose. Two years of A-level coursework drafts, EPQ files, UCAS supporting evidence, class OneNote with teacher annotations. This is the work universities sometimes want to see; this is what becomes your dissertation literature review three years later when you revisit a topic you covered at A-level.

Practical recommendations

Year 11 leavers staying for sixth form: download anyway. You don't lose the live account, but having an archive of your Year 11 work means you can go back to it if the school's data later gets archived, restructured, or accidentally lost.

Year 11 leavers moving on: this is mandatory. Your Year 11 mocks revision is the single most useful set of notes a Year 12 student has. Don't lose it.

Year 13 leavers: also mandatory. Particular focus on class OneNote — the workload most universities can't replicate and you'll most miss in your first term.

Calendar shape

For most UK schools, both year groups follow roughly the same closure timeline:

• Exam season runs May / June.
• Final week of school is late June or early July.
• Results come out in mid-August.
• Account deactivations cluster from late August through October.
• Soft-delete grace period is typically 30 days.
• Hard delete by November in most cases.

Independent schools tend to compress this — accounts may close by end of August. State schools and academies often stretch through October.

The Y11-staying-on-but-just-in-case archive

If you're in bucket 1 — staying at the same school for sixth form — and you're tempted to skip downloading: don't. Twenty minutes now means you have a Year 7 to Year 11 archive that exists outside any tenant migration, account corruption, or future IT decision.

It's not paranoid; it's prudent. The cost is negligible. The opposite outcome — finding the work isn't there in two years when you need a specific note for an A-level revision session — is annoying.

The script

For Year 11 leavers staying on or moving:

1. Sign in to mydocs.school (or use the manual paths if your school isn't onboarded).
2. Download everything in one zip.
3. Save in two places — your laptop plus a personal Google Drive.
4. Open one of the OneNote sections on a personal Microsoft account to confirm it works.

For Year 13 leavers:

1. Same as above.
2. Additional: export your school email to PST if you have Outlook for Windows, or set up forwarding before your account closes.
3. Update any external accounts using your school email (UCAS, university portals, GitHub Education, etc.).
4. Note that the soft-delete window won't help you — once August closes, assume the window is closing too.

What the school's IT team can and can't do

If you discover after leaving that you needed something specific, your school's IT team can sometimes help — but only within constraints:

• During soft-delete (the 30-day window post-deactivation): a tenant admin can temporarily reactivate your account so you can sign in once and download. Politely worth asking.
• After hard delete: nothing they can do. The data isn't there.
• At any point: they have no obligation to restore your account, even within the soft-delete window. Whether they will depends on the school's culture and capacity.

The strongest position is the one you don't need to take: download in time.

The UK calendar trap students miss

Results day in August is when the leaver moment hits emotionally. By then, you've been a "leaver" for several weeks and your account may already be in the deactivation queue. The much better moment to act is before exam season starts. The work is fresh, the account is active, the school Wi-Fi is fast.

Take the hour. It's the cheapest hour of admin you'll ever pay against years of regret.