Academic structure.

Most of this handbook describes things a school does every day — marking a register, recording a payment, publishing a report. This chapter describes the thing a school does once and then relies on all year: it lays out its academic architecture. Get it right and every other module simply works, because each one reads its world from here. Get it wrong — a term with the wrong dates, a programme with no grading system, a class with no sections — and the errors surface everywhere downstream at once.

There is a natural order to it, and YESS is built to be set up in that order. The calendar comes first, because terms are what everything is dated against. Then the organisational and curricular shape — departments, the subject pool, the programmes that define what each cohort studies. Then the classes and sections students actually sit in. Each layer depends on the ones before it, so building them in sequence means you never reference something that doesn't exist yet.

Build the scaffold once, in the right order, and the whole school stands on it.

Everything is dated against a term, so the calendar is built first. At /dashboard/academic-years you create an academic year and the terms inside it — each with a name, a number, start and end dates, and its holidays. A stats strip tracks the total years, the current year, the total terms and the active ones, and expanding a year reveals its terms with live progress bars showing how far each has run.

Dividing a year into terms is fast with the term-shape painter on a year's detail page: pick a preset — three-term, two-semester, four-quarter, or custom — and YESS lays out even, non-overlapping term boundaries you can then fine-tune by hand before saving. Each year's detail page also carries a timeline view of its terms and a milestones view of its critical dates; the year-end rollover, meanwhile, is launched as a per-year action from the academic-years list when the year closes.

A programme is a curriculum — the BSc, the GCE A-Level track, the primary phase, the IB diploma. You manage them at /dashboard/programs, each with a level — primary, secondary, high school, university or vocational — that tells the rest of the platform how to treat its students (a university programme compiles credits and a GPA; a secondary one compiles CA and exam marks). A programme's detail page is a hub of curricular surfaces, because what a cohort studies is defined here, not on the class.

Departments are how the school groups its staff and subjects — the Science department, the Languages department — and they live at /dashboard/departments. Each carries a name and code, an optional campus, a head of department, its members and its subjects. A department's detail page is a small operations world in itself, with six rooms: an overview, a members room, a subjects room, a workload heatmap, a trips room where a teacher can request and a manager can plan a field trip, and an internal messages room. The field-trip approvals themselves run from the department's trip-requests queue, linked from the departments list.

Departments are an organisational lens, not a teaching one — a student is never enrolled "in" a department. But they are where a head looks to see how evenly a team's teaching load is spread, and where a subject gets its departmental home before it is offered to a programme.

Subjects are defined once for the whole school at /dashboard/subjects — name, code, department, whether it is compulsory or elective, its credit hours and periods per week, plus two hints the timetable solver reads: a cognitive-load score and any required-equipment tags (so a lab subject lands in a lab). This single pool is what programmes draw from in their catalogues and what the timetable schedules; defining a subject in one place means it carries the same identity everywhere it appears.

The same screen's second tab is where teacher assignments are managed — who teaches (and co-teaches) which subject, to which section, in which term, filtered by year, term, class and section. Those assignments are the link between a subject and the people delivering it, and they are what the timetable, the gradebook and the logbook all read to know whose class is whose.

Finally, the structure students actually sit in. At /dashboard/classes you create a class — bound to a programme, an academic year and a campus — and divide it into sections, the homeroom-sized groups a student belongs to. A bulk generator creates a set of classes at once; filters narrow the list by programme, campus or year. A class's detail page is its own world: the sections and their student rosters, the class timetable, its subjects and teacher assignments, and several configuration rooms.

A class is tuned partly through inline rooms — Promotion and Progression — and partly through two sub-pages of its own. Class roles (a sub-page) appoint a prefect, secretary, treasurer, sports captain or custom role per term, one holder each. Period structure (a sub-page) lets a class override the campus or school bell schedule for its own slots, resolving class → campus → school. Promotion rules set the thresholds that decide who moves up — minimum average and attendance, a pass mark, a minimum proportion of subjects passed, core subjects that must be passed, whether conduct counts (and its weight), and a conditional band. And the progression chain wires this class to the one students advance into at year-end — a default next class plus branching paths — including approving the choices students make where the next step branches.

Because each layer rests on the one below, a first-time setup follows a dependency order. Start with the academic year and its terms — the calendar everything dates against. Then lay the organisational and curricular groundwork: departments, the subject pool mapped to those departments, and the programmes that will use them.

With programmes in place, fill each one's subject catalogue — or its course catalogue for a university programme — plus subject groups or paper combinations where the system needs them. Then create the classes per programme, year and campus; split them into sections; make the subject–teacher assignments; and set each class's promotion rules. The finishing touches — progression chains, class roles, per-class period structure, and programme coordinators — come last, once the spine they attach to exists.