Alviyora

Academics

Years, grades, classes and subjects

The scaffolding everything else hangs on. Get this right and the rest follows.

Written for School admin
On this page

This page has no sections.

Four things hold up everything else in Alviyora: the academic year, your grades, the classes inside them, and your subjects. Registers, timetables, homework, marks and promotion all hang off these. They all live on one screen, Academics Settings, one per tab.

Who can do this

Manage Academic Settings. Admin holds it; teachers do not.

Academics Settings. Four tabs, and the order you work through them is Years → Grades → Subjects → Teacher Assignments.

The academic year

Academics Settings → Academic Years.

Almost everything in Alviyora is filed under a year: the register, timetables, homework, assessments and marks. Create the current year and mark it current.

Worth knowing

Until a year exists and is marked current, very little works. Assessments cannot be created, homework cannot be set, and enrolment has nothing to attach to. If a screen is inexplicably empty on a brand-new school, check this first.

At the end of the year you create the next one, run year-end promotion, and mark the new year current. The old year stays: its marks, registers and timetables remain readable.

Grades

Academics Settings → Grades.

Add every grade your school teaches. Grade R through Grade 12 for most South African schools; whatever your school actually uses otherwise.

Each grade shows its number of classes, its learner count, an optional maximum, and whether it is active. A grade can be deactivated when a school stops offering it, which keeps its history without offering it in new pickers — and reactivated just as easily if that turns out to be premature, or was a mistake.

Undoing a deactivation

A deactivated grade shows as Inactive in the list, with a Reactivate button in place of the deactivate action. Click it and the grade — sections, learners, history, everything — comes back exactly as it was. Nothing about a grade is ever deleted, only deactivated, so there is always a way back.

Classes within a grade

Grades that run more than one class get sections — 8A, 8B, 8C. Expand a grade row to add them.

A grade with no sections is not a broken grade. It is a single-class grade, and everything that takes a class — the register, homework, a timetable — treats the grade itself as the class.

How many sections do you need?

One per class group that is taught together and registered together. If Grade 8 splits into three form classes that stay together for the register but mix for Maths, you want three sections. Subject mixing is handled by enrolment, not by sections.

Creating grades and classes in bulk

Adding Grade R through 12 one at a time, then expanding each to add its sections one at a time, is real hours of work for a school setting up from scratch. Bulk Create, next to Add Grade, does it in one pass.

Bulk Create builds every grade and section in one pass.

Pick the grade prefix

Almost always “Grade”. Pick a different one only if your school already set up “Year” or “Form” instead.

Pick which grades exist

A preset for Primary (Grade R–7), High school (8–12), or Combined (R–12) checks the usual range in one click — or tick individual boxes for whatever your school actually has. The presets are a shortcut, not a requirement.

Set how many sections each grade gets

Type a number once and apply it to every grade you selected, then adjust individual grades that need more or fewer — Grade 8 might need seven sections where Grade 12 only needs two. Each grade shows exactly which letters it will create as you type.

Create the structure

One click creates every grade and every section named above.

Safe to run even after setting some of this up by hand

Bulk Create never duplicates or overwrites a grade or section that already exists — it only fills in what’s missing, and tells you plainly what it did: “Created 5 grades and 35 sections. 3 already existed and were left untouched.” There is no wrong order to do this in.

Subjects

Academics Settings → Subjects.

List every subject the school offers, once, at school level. Subjects are not per-grade here — attaching them to grades is a separate step, because Grade 8 and Grade 12 offer different sets from the same list.

Keep the names as you would print them on a report: Mathematics, not Maths; Life Orientation, not LO. They appear on the timetable, on marks, on homework and on the report card.

Teacher assignments

Academics Settings → Teacher Assignments.

This is the join between people and academics: this teacher takes this subject in this grade (and optionally this class) in this year.

It is the single most consequential piece of filing in the whole system, because three separate things read from it:

  • The register. A teacher’s class picker on Take Register lists the classes they are assigned to. No assignment, no classes, empty screen.
  • The timetable. Uploading a class timetable fills in the teacher for each lesson automatically from these assignments.
  • Homework and marks. What a teacher can set and capture is scoped by them.

This is the one that produces support calls

“The register is broken — my class list is empty” is almost never the register. It is a missing teacher assignment. Check here first, every time.

Assignments can be uploaded in bulk from a spreadsheet — see Importing from a spreadsheet — which is worth doing for a school of any size.

The order, and why it is the order

Each of these depends on the ones above it:

  1. Academic year — nothing is filed without it.
  2. Grades — classes, registers and timetables all need them.
  3. Sections — need a grade to sit in.
  4. Subjects — independent, but needed before the next two.
  5. Grade subjects — need grades and subjects both.
  6. Teacher assignments — need a year, a grade, a subject and a staff member.

Work down and nothing is ever missing. Work out of order and you meet a picker with nothing in it and no explanation of why.

Grade subjects and enrolments Which subjects a grade takes, and which learners sit in each of them. Bulk enrol included.Timetables Periods, class timetables, exam timetables — uploaded by hand or built by the generator.Set up a new school From registering your school to a working first day, in the order the system expects.