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Documentation
How the academic year, grading, results and the platform console work, written for the people who run a school rather than for the people who build it.
Ashee SMS is a school management system built around one idea: a school's year is a record, and everything else is derived from it. This manual is written for the people who run a school. It says what to do, in the order you do it, and it says plainly where a capability does not exist yet.
What to do first
If you are starting a school, this is the whole path. Nothing here needs a developer, and nothing is charged before you decide it should be.
- Create the school. Create a school walks the four screens: where to reach you, the address your school will live at, and the verification that creates it. Nothing exists until the email is verified.
- Set the year up, before the term starts. Setting up a school asks for four things in an order that matters: the year and its terms, the classes and subjects it offers, the people, and the grading defaults. An hour here saves a term of corrections.
- Bring the people in. Signing in, and who sees what explains the two roles: an administrator runs the year, and a teacher reaches only the class and subject pairs assigned to them.
- Enter the term's marks. Enter and correct marks is the daily work. Marks are the input; the result is calculated from the school's own grading policy rather than typed.
- Publish the results. Publish results explains what publishing freezes: a version a parent can be shown. A later correction changes the current figures and never the published version.
- Keep the term running. Running a term is what the weeks after the first look like: corrections, the trail they leave, and the hand-over at the end of a year.
The academic year
First term
Second term
Third term
A term names nothing on its own: a class, a subject and a placement all point at the year and the term they belong to.
Where to read next
| If you are asking | Read |
|---|---|
| What is this, and what does it hold? | What Ashee SMS is |
| How is a school year structured? | The academic year |
| Why is a result calculated instead of typed? | Results and publication |
| How is grading decided? | Grading policies |
| Who can see what? | Roles and permissions |
| How is one school kept apart from another? | How one school stays its own |
| What does a term look like, week by week? | A school's first week |
| What is not built yet? | Lifecycle states and the feature catalogue |
Two things these pages assume
First, that a school decides its own structure: its calendar, its classes, its grading policy. Second, that a result is calculated from those decisions rather than typed by hand, which is the property the rest of the product is built to protect.
If you operate the platform
Most of this manual is for a school. The platform console - the staff-side surface at admin. followed by the
deployment's domain - is documented in the pages written for it: Signing in, and who sees what
covers the console's separate door, and the reference pages state what each
platform permission reaches.
A note on honesty
Every page here describes the product as it ships. A feature described in the future tense is a feature that does not exist yet, and the pages say which tense they are in. Where a capability is missing, the page says so rather than leaving a gap a reader would fill with hope.