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Ashee SMSSchool management

Concepts

The academic year

What a year holds, why a term is not a folder, and how a class, a subject and a placement hang from the same statement.

Everything in Ashee SMS points at an academic year. This page describes that structure, because every other page in this manual assumes it: a mark belongs to a term, a term belongs to a year, and a placement names the class a student was in during a particular year.

The year

A year is named by the school: 2025/2026, or whatever the school calls it. It has a start and an end, and it is the thing a reader means when they ask for "last year's results". A year is created once, and it is never reused.

The terms inside it

A year is divided into terms. The number is the school's decision, and it is the decision that shapes the rest of the year:

  • a basic school in Ghana runs three terms;
  • a college runs two semesters;
  • a school in the United States runs quarters or semesters, or a calendar it configures;
  • a school whose model fits none of those states its own.

The number of terms decides how often results are published, which is why the product asks for it at setup rather than assuming one shape.

Classes, subjects and placements

A class is a group of students taught together: JSS 1A. A subject is what is taught: Mathematics. A placement is the record that a particular student was in a particular class for a particular year, and it is dated.

Keeping those three separate is what lets a school rename a class without touching a mark, offer the same subject to two year groups with different grading policies, and answer which students were in a class in a past term.

The shape as data

The structure a school states at setup is roughly this, and everything else is derived from it:

{
  "year": "2025/2026",
  "terms": ["First term", "Second term", "Third term"],
  "classes": ["JSS 1A", "JSS 1B", "JSS 2A"],
  "subjects": ["Mathematics", "English Language", "Basic Science"]
}

Why the shape matters

A school office does not need another place to type numbers. It needs the year, the people and the policy recorded once, in a way that survives a change of staff. That is why the year comes first here, and why running a term is mostly a matter of following it.