Sessions, terms, and classes

The academic calendar is the backbone of your school. Scores, attendance, invoices, report cards, and portal content are all filed against a session and a term. Getting this structure right at the start makes every later task straightforward; getting it wrong means correcting records that families may already have seen.

Understanding the structure

• A session is your academic year.
• Each session contains terms (or semesters) matching your school calendar.
• Levels and arms describe your year groups and their divisions — for example a level with arms A, B, and C.
• A class is a specific teaching group within a session, usually built from a level and an arm.
• Class students are the learners placed on a class roster for that session.

Only one session is active at a time. The active session determines what teachers, students, and parents see by default.

Step 1 — Create the session and terms

1. Open School Management → Sessions.
2. Add a new session, or create the next session from an existing one to carry your structure forward.
3. Enter the session name in the format your school uses and set its start and end dates.
4. Confirm the terms match your calendar — the number of terms and their dates.
5. Save, then set the session as active when you are ready to work in it.

Sessions move through a lifecycle: Draft → Active → Completed → Archived. Draft lets you prepare next year quietly while the current year continues. Completed closes a year for routine editing. Archived keeps history available for reference without cluttering day-to-day screens.

Step 2 — Define levels and arms

1. Open Levels & Arms under School Management.
2. Create each level your school teaches.
3. Add the arms used to split a level into teaching groups.
4. Save. You now have the building blocks for creating classes quickly.

If your school does not split year groups, you can keep a single arm per level and the rest of the product behaves normally.

Step 3 — Create classes for the active session

1. Go to Sessional Activities → Classes.
2. Create a class for each teaching group in the active session.
3. Assign a class teacher to each class. This is what unlocks the Class Teacher workspace for that person.
4. Save and review the list to confirm every group your school teaches is represented.

Step 4 — Place students on rosters

1. Open Class Students.
2. Select the class you want to populate.
3. Add learners individually, or use import when you are moving a full roll.
4. Export the roster if you need a copy for offline checking or for another office system.
5. Review the totals per class before teaching begins.

What you’ll see

• The active session and term shown across academic screens, so everyone knows which period they are working in.
• Class lists appearing in the teacher and class teacher workspaces.
• Students seeing their class, timetable, and eventually results in the portal.

End of year: academic progression

When a session ends, use Academic Progression rather than rebuilding classes by hand.

1. Create the next session in draft and confirm its terms.
2. Open Academic Progression and review each class.
3. Mark students to be promoted, repeated, or graduated.
4. Apply the progression to build next year’s rosters.
5. Activate the new session when the school is ready to teach in it.

Common issues

Teachers say the wrong term is showing

Check which session is active and which term falls within today’s date. Term dates that overlap or leave gaps cause confusing behaviour.

A student appears in two classes

Remove the learner from the incorrect roster in Class Students. Duplicate placements lead to duplicated invoices and reports.

I cannot edit scores from last term

Completed and archived sessions are protected from casual editing. An administrator can allow edits where a genuine correction is needed.

New students arrived mid-term

Add them through Class Students, or enroll them through Admissions, which creates the student record and lets you place them straight away.

What’s next

With classes in place, attach subjects to those classes and assign the teachers who will enter scores.