Weekly Grades

Weekly grades let a teacher record one mark per subject per academic week, and let the school release each week to its families. They sit alongside your ordinary term grades rather than replacing them, and nothing changes for a school that does not switch them on.

Switching it on

There is nothing to switch on. Every subject a class takes is graded weekly by default, so a teacher can open a sheet and start marking on the first day. Go to Grades → Weekly setup only to change something: to switch off a subject the class does not mark weekly, or to change what a mark is out of (ten by default).

Switching a subject off costs nothing if you change your mind. A subject nobody marks has no marks, so it is absent from every average and prints on no report card, whether it is switched off or simply unmarked.

What a class takes comes from its own subject list, and from your whole subject catalogue for a class whose list you have not filled in. Setup is held per term, and because every subject is graded weekly by default, a term you have not visited grades everything. Grading weekly in the first term and not the second is therefore something you switch off in the second term, not something that follows from leaving it alone. At the start of a new term Copy from brings a previous term's choices and maximums across for a class rather than making you set them again, and it can copy from a previous session as well as a previous term.

The week numbers come from your academic calendar. A term with no dates set has no weeks to grade, so set its dates under Academic Setup first.

A week that has not begun yet cannot be marked. Its sheet opens read-only and says when the week starts, so a full column of marks cannot be entered for lessons two months away.

Entering marks

Grades → Weekly marks opens on this term and the week it is now, so on a Friday afternoon a teacher picks a class and a subject and starts typing. Enter, or the arrow keys, moves down the column. One Save writes the lot, and a count of unsaved boxes appears as soon as there is one.

Leave a box empty for a pupil you have not marked. An empty box is not a zero:

• No mark is left out of that pupil's average entirely.
• A 0 you type is a mark, and counts against them.

That distinction runs through everything below, including the report card, so it is worth knowing before a class of sixty is filled in.

Admins can enter marks for any class and subject. Class teachers can enter any subject for their own class, and subject teachers their own subjects for any class: the same rule as ordinary grades.

Publishing a week

A week goes out once for a class, across every subject at once, rather than each teacher notifying families as they finish. Grades → Publish does it either a class at a time or for the whole school in one press. It opens on the whole school for anybody holding the publish permission; somebody who may only lock a week opens on One class, and is not offered the scope that would refuse them.

It works the same way on the phone: Weekly Grades → the send icon opens the same list of classes with the same one button, for staff who hold the publish permission. Reviewing one class subject by subject stays on the web, since that is a table.

The whole school at once

All classes lists every class that grades weekly with how many marks are in, which subjects nobody has marked, and whether the week is already out. Tick the classes you want and press Publish all. The confirmation names the classes that are only part-marked before anything is sent.

Nothing goes out silently. A class with no marks at all is skipped rather than sent empty, a locked class is left alone, and both are reported back by name afterwards, so a run of eighteen classes never leaves you checking each one by hand to find the two that did not go.

Clicking a class name opens that class on its own, which is where the missing pupils are named.

One class at a time

One class shows every subject the class grades weekly, how much of each is entered, and the pupils still missing by name. It is the right scope when one class's marks are in and the rest are not, and the only one that names who is missing from which subject.

An incomplete week can still be published, since a school whose Music teacher is away should be able to send the other eight subjects. Those missing marks are simply absent from the week; they are never counted as zero. The confirmation says which subjects are short before you send it.

Publishing notifies each pupil's parents (and pupils who have no parent on the system), in the app and by whichever channels you have chosen under Settings → Notifications.

Telling families at all is itself a setting. Under Settings → Weekly Grades, Tell families when a week is published is on by default; switch it off and publishing a week sends nothing on any channel, whatever the channel matrix says. The week still becomes visible to families on their own pages the moment it goes out, so this is the setting for a school that would rather publish quietly than not publish at all.

There is no WhatsApp for this one, and its box in that matrix is greyed out with the reason on it, on the web and in the mobile app alike. Families are told in the app, by push and by email instead. This was costed and decided against rather than left unfinished, for three reasons. WhatsApp gives the whole platform a shared daily allowance of business-initiated conversations, and one school of twenty classes publishing a week would use it up in an evening, taking every fee reminder and exam timetable queued behind it. A week published up to fifteen times a term is by a wide margin the most frequent notice the platform sends, and that frequency on a family messaging app is what earns the blocks that damage delivery for every school. And it would carry less than the email already does, since the message names the week rather than the marks, so it could only say "sign in to read this" beside a free push that opens the screen directly.

What goes out names the week, not the marks. The push and the email both say which class and which week, and send the reader to the screen; neither carries a score, and the email has no PDF attached. A lock screen is not the place for a child's marks, and nine of them emailed fifteen times a term is a report card sent every week. The PDF is a download on the week itself, once the reader has signed in.

Submitting Publish twice publishes once and notifies once.

Withdraw, lock, unlock

• Withdraw hides a published week from families again. Nothing further is sent.
• Lock freezes a published week so its marks can no longer be changed, once you consider it closed.
• Unlock reopens a locked week for correction.

A published week still accepts corrections, so a teacher who finds a transcription error on Monday can simply fix it. Locking is how you say the week is finished.

Lock and unlock are on the phone as well, on the class itself: each published class in Weekly Grades → the send icon carries a Lock week action, and each locked one an Unlock week. Locking asks you to confirm, because it stops the teacher who has just spotted a wrong mark; unlocking only hands that back, so it does not ask. Withdrawing a week stays on the web, beside the review that says what the families were sent.

What parents and pupils see

The most recent published week also appears in the weekly parent digest, the Sunday email, under its own heading beside the term grades. Only published weeks are ever included, so a week a teacher is still working through never reaches a family by email.

Parents open a child's record and tap or click Weekly Grades; pupils have their own Weekly Grades page. Both show only weeks the school has published, most recent first, with:

• every subject's mark for the week,
• the same subject in the previous published week, and
• whether it moved up or down.

The comparison is the point: nine marks on their own say very little, and beside last week's they answer the question a parent actually has. Each week can also be downloaded as a branded PDF.

A week you have not published is invisible to families everywhere: on the web, in the app, in the PDF and in the notifications.

On the report card

Weekly grades can carry a figure onto the term report card. This is off until you switch it on, so enabling weekly grading changes nothing about your existing report cards.

Under Settings → Weekly Grades on the Report Card, switch on Include weekly grades on the report card, set what it is worth (20 marks by default), and give it whatever heading you use for it. That is the whole of it: the section appears on your card straight away, below the subject table and the traits.

One switch, in one place. The Report Card Designer no longer has an on/off control for this section, because it used to have to be switched on there as well and nothing said so, which left schools looking at unchanged cards after enabling the setting. The designer still decides where the section prints and what it shows, and it says where the switch is.

The figure is the average of the weeks actually recorded, converted to the marks you configured. Four weeks averaging 7.5 out of 10 gives 15 out of 20. Weeks with no mark are left out of the average; a 0 a teacher entered is included. Each subject's own average is printed under the total, so the figure can be checked by hand.

Weekly grades print as their own section. They are never added into a subject's total, so no figure your report cards already carry changes.

Changing your mind later

Two things are protected, and it is worth knowing why:

• Changing what a mark is out of never restates a mark already entered. Every weekly mark keeps the maximum it was recorded against, so moving Maths from 10 to 20 in January leaves December's 8/10 as 8/10 rather than silently turning it into 8/20.
• Once you have issued a report card, its weekly-grades figure is fixed. Saving a card or generating a class's PDFs records the figure as it stood, so raising the contribution next term cannot change what a card you handed out last term said.

On the phone

Both halves are on the mobile app. Staff record a week under More → Weekly Grades by picking a class, a subject and a week, and publish from the same screen. Because marking follows the school's current term, a school between terms is told so rather than shown an empty sheet.

Families read the published weeks on their own side: a parent opens Weekly grades on a child's record, a pupil finds it in their own portal. Each week is a card giving the week's dates, the total out of what was available, and every subject with its mark, the previous week's mark and the movement between them. A subject with no mark that week is absent rather than counted as zero, which the screen says in as many words, and each week can be downloaded on its own.

Who can do what

Publishing is separate from recording on purpose: releasing a week to every family in a class is not something the first teacher to finish marking should do on the school's behalf. The seeded Principal, Vice Principal and Academic Coordinator roles can publish; Teacher, Class Teacher and Subject Teacher record.