Grades and classes

A school is arranged the way its timetable is: by grade. Every learner is in one grade and in one form class — their home class, the one whose teacher takes the daily register a parent sees. What they are taught is a separate question. Some subjects are taught to the whole form class together; others are taught to whichever learners chose them, in classes that can mix learners from every form class in the grade. Grades & classes is where the office describes that, one grade at a time, and from that description MySentinel builds every subject class and every subject register for you.

Nothing here assumes a phase. A Grade 4 class that splits for its home language and a Grade 11 cohort choosing three electives are described the same way, so a school sets up what it actually does rather than what a phase is supposed to do.

The grades screen

The screen lists your grades grouped by phase — Foundation phase, Intermediate phase, Senior phase and FET phase, with anything else under Other grades. Each grade shows how many form classes and learners it has and one line about its readiness: Ready when every subject class has a teacher, No subjects yet when the grade has not been described, or how many classes still need a teacher. That last line is the one to watch at the start of a term; it is what turns into an unregistered lesson on the first Monday.

A form class with no grade is listed apart, under Form classes without a grade. It takes no subjects until it has one, because a class’s subjects are its grade’s subjects.

Which registers the school takes

At the top of the screen, Registers this school takes carries two switches, both on unless the school turns one off:

• Form class register — the daily register, taken by the form teacher. It is what parents see.
• Subject registers — a register for each subject class, taken by its teachers. They are for staff only and never change what a parent is told.

One of the two is always on — A school takes at least one register. — because a school that takes neither has no record of who was in the building beyond the gate. The setting is school-wide. A school that only wants the daily register switches subject registers off and its teachers stop seeing them; nothing already taken is lost.

One grade

Open on a grade gives you its own page, with up to five tabs. You land on the one where the work is: who teaches what for a grade taught by form class, the choices for one whose learners choose, the subject list for a grade not yet set up.

The form classes tab lists the grade’s form classes and their form teachers. Manage opens the class’s own page, the one described under classes in the attendance chapter, and Add form class starts a new one.

Subjects

The subjects tab is the grade’s subject list, and for each subject one decision: With the form class or Learners choose. A subject taken with the form class needs no lists — every learner in the class takes it — so the only question left is who teaches it. A chosen subject is taught to the learners who chose it, and its classes are built from their choices.

An empty grade offers Use the suggested subjects, which fills in the CAPS subjects for that grade as a starting point to edit rather than a rule. A chosen subject can be given a choice group: a name and how many subjects a learner takes from it, such as electives where every learner takes three. A learner’s subjects are complete when every group is full, and that is what the choices screen counts.

Removing a subject, or turning a form-class subject into a choice, archives the subject classes that followed the form class for it. Registers already taken stay on record; the archive only stops new ones.

Who teaches what

For subjects taken with the form class, Who teaches what is a grid: a row per form class, a column per subject, a teacher in each cell. Anyone who holds the teacher role can be chosen, including a deputy who also works in the office. Fill with form teachers puts each form teacher on every empty subject in their own class — the usual arrangement in the lower grades — and you change only the exceptions before you Save.

There is nothing else to set up for these subjects. A form class’s Mathematics is a subject class whose learners are simply the form class, so a learner who joins or leaves the class joins or leaves its subjects with them.

Subject choices

For chosen subjects, Subject choices is a table of the grade’s learners against its choice groups, with a learner’s form class beside their name and a chip saying whether their subjects are complete. Filter to the incomplete ones, or to one form class, and choose subjects in the cells. Nothing is saved until Save choices, and the screen tells you how many learners have unsaved changes so a half-finished edit is not mistaken for a finished one.

A choice counts from the day it is saved. A subject dropped today ends today, and the learner leaves that subject’s class; registers already taken keep them where they were, because a register is a statement about a lesson that happened.

Choices for a whole grade can come in from a spreadsheet: Import choices (CSV) takes one row per learner — their learner number or full name, then each subject they chose. Every row is checked before anything is written. A name that matches no learner in the grade, or a subject that is not a choice in it, is named with its row number and left out, and the import button says how many learners it will import — so a bad row is never imported, and never silently dropped either.

At the end of a year a school can enter next year’s choices before the year rolls over. On the grades that follow another, a toggle switches the table between this year’s learners and the learners now in the grade below, whose choices count when they move up.

Subjects and classes

Subjects & classes shows each chosen subject with how many learners chose it, its classes and their teachers, and how many who chose it are not in a class yet. Add class adds another class for a subject that has outgrown one.

Place learners does the sorting: everyone who chose a subject goes into one of its classes, smallest class first, and anyone who no longer takes the subject is taken out. A learner already in a class stays there, so pressing it again after a few late choices moves nobody who was already settled. It reports what it did in one line — how many were placed, how many taken out, how many classes it had to create.

What a teacher sees

A teacher’s home screen lists every register they take today: their form class, if they have one, and every subject class they teach, from either kind of subject. They take each one the same way. The form class register is the one a parent’s day is built from; the subject registers are the school’s record of who was in each lesson.

When the year rolls over

The year-end rollover carries all of this forward rather than leaving the school to rebuild it. Form-class subjects are rebuilt for each new form class from its grade’s list, keeping a teacher where the form teacher taught the subject. Classes for chosen subjects move up a grade with the same learners and teachers. The leaving grade’s classes end. The rollover’s preview says what it will do before anyone confirms it, including how many learners moving into a grade with chosen subjects still have no choices — which is why entering next year’s choices early is worth the trouble.