Turning the Session Over
The July fortnight: approving and publishing the year’s results, running the promotion as a batch you can roll back, opening the next session and its terms, checking the days the school actually operates, laying the calendar over them, and making sure the classes the promoted cohort lands in exist before anybody arrives.
The order these things happen in is the whole job
Every school does this once a year and every school does it under time pressure, usually with two people and a spreadsheet. It is not one decision — it is a sequence, and the sequence matters more than any step in it. The results have to be approved before the promotion rules read them; the promotion has to run as something you can undo, because it moves eleven hundred children at once; the new session has to exist before a calendar can be laid over it; the operating schedule has to be right before the calendar is generated; and the class arms the promoted cohort is about to land in have to exist before September, not during it. This walkthrough is that sequence, screen by screen, in the order a school actually has to do it.
On this page
Close the year before you touch anything else
Nothing in this flow can start until the year’s marks are final, because the promotion rules read them. A school that runs the promotion with two classes still unapproved has just made forty promotion decisions on incomplete data — and made them silently.
Every class’s results, and which are still outstanding
The queue of result submissions from form teachers, by class, with what is approved, what is waiting and what has been sent back. The number that matters here is the outstanding one — it is the checklist that has to reach zero before the next phase is safe.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “Close the year before you touch anything else” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Decide the rule once, then move everybody
Promotion in most schools is a meeting and a list. Here it is a rule the school writes down, applied to a cohort, producing a batch that can be inspected before it is committed and rolled back after it — because a promotion moves every child in the school at once, and anything that big needs an undo.
The rule, written down once
What this school means by “promoted”: the average that passes, whether attendance counts, what happens to a repeat, and which subjects are compulsory in the calculation. Written once, applied consistently — which is also what makes it defensible to a parent who disagrees.
The requests, class by class
Form teachers submit their class for promotion with their recommendations; the office reviews each against the rule and the broadsheet behind it. A recommendation that disagrees with the rule is exactly the case a school wants surfaced rather than averaged away.
And the run itself, which can be undone
A promotion run is a batch: it names the cohort, the rule it applied, who ran it and when, and it can be rolled back in one action. That last property is the reason schools are willing to press the button in the first place.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “Decide the rule once, then move everybody” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Open the next session, and its terms
A session is a real object here, not a label on a filter. Every mark, register, invoice, report and audit row is stamped with the term it belongs to — which is what makes “last term” a query rather than an archive folder, and what makes creating the next one a step you cannot skip.
Sessions, with their terms inside them
The years the school has run, each with its terms, and exactly one term marked current. That single flag is what the whole platform reads: the register defaults to it, the gradebook writes into it, the sidebar’s period picker starts on it.
Creating the session
A name and two dates. Small screen, large consequences: these dates are what the calendar is laid over, what the fee schedule is dated against, and what decides which session a mark entered on the 4th of September belongs to.
And its terms
Three of them, typically, each with its own start and end. Terms are where the real work is dated: a term boundary is what closes a gradebook, what a report card covers, and what an invoice run is generated for.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “Open the next session, and its terms” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
The days you actually operate, and the year laid over them
This is the step schools skip and then spend September regretting. The operating schedule is what the register, the timetable and the calendar are all generated against — so if the school runs a half-day Saturday and the schedule says it does not, every one of those is wrong before anybody arrives.
Which days the school runs, and between what hours
Per day of the week: active or not, and the hours if it is. The Saturday row is the one that earns this screen — plenty of schools run a half-day, and a five-day assumption gets it wrong in the register, the timetable and the attendance percentage a promotion rule later reads.
Then the year’s own events over the top
Term dates, mid-term breaks, public holidays, examination weeks, sports day, the parents’ evening. Everybody sees the calendar for their own portal — staff, pupils and guardians read the same events without the school publishing three versions of them.
And the classes the promoted cohort will land in
The last step before September, and the one that quietly breaks a rollover: a cohort promoted into a class arm that does not exist. Grades, their arms and their capacities are set here, and a school that grew this year needs the extra arm created before the promotion lands, not after.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “The days you actually operate, and the year laid over them” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
And the families find out without being told twice
The rollover ends where it should: with the people it is about. A promotion is a decision a family will ask about, so it arrives as a record rather than as a rumour on a WhatsApp group.
Their child’s promotion, and the class they are going into
The decision, the session it was made for, and the class the child moves to. Held-back and repeated decisions appear here too — a school that is willing to show the good outcome and hide the difficult one has not built a record, it has built a notice board.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “And the families find out without being told twice” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Run your whole school on one connected platform
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