Head teacher / Administrator

Setting up your school

Register, add your academic year, classes, streams and subjects. Done once.

A new school takes about fifteen minutes to set up. Do these in order — each one depends on the last, and nothing at all works until there is a current term.

1. Register your school

   From Register your school. You choose a school code — a short word your staff type when they sign in, like stmary. Pick something they will remember; it appears in your address and is awkward to change later.

2. Add your academic year and terms

   Admin → Academic years & terms. A Ugandan year is three terms, so adding a year creates all three at once, named the way schools already write them.

   Then set the current term. Marks, comments, fees and report cards are all recorded against a term, and GradeFlex needs to know which one you are in.

   Nothing works before this. No marks can be entered and no report card can be produced until a current term is set. If your year already exists but is missing a term, that page offers to add the missing ones.

3. Add classes and streams

   Learners → Classes, then Streams. A class is S.1, S.2 and so on. A stream is a division within it — S.1 Blue, S.1 Green. If your school does not stream, make one stream per class and name it after the class.

   Each stream can have a class teacher, who is the person allowed to write comments and email cards for that stream.

4. Add subjects

   Learners → Subjects. Add every subject the school teaches. They are school-wide; which learners sit which subject follows from whose marks you enter.

5. Choose the grading mode for each class

   Classes → Grading. This decides how a mark is worked out and which columns appear on the report card. It is set per class, so S.1 and S.4 can differ, and it can be overridden for a single term.

   See Choosing a grading mode — it is the one decision worth reading about before making.

6. Check the grade rubric

   Settings → Results. GradeFlex starts with the usual Ugandan A–E bands. If your school uses different ranges or different words, change them here — the rubric printed on every card comes from this table, and so does every grade.

7. Make it look like your school

   Settings → General for the logo (it also becomes the faint watermark behind the card), address and phone. Settings → Appearance for your colours. Settings → Signature for the head teacher's signature and the school stamp.

   You see the picture before you save it. Choose a logo, signature or stamp and it appears immediately in the box, so you can check it is the right file rather than finding out on a printed card.

What next

Get your learners in, then your staff. If you are only trying GradeFlex out, add one learner and one subject's marks — that is enough to print a real card and judge it.