Classes, terms & madrassa settings

Structure is the shared vocabulary behind rosters, registers and reports. Set it deliberately before a bulk intake, then make changes when the real organisation changes, not merely to tidy an old report.

Use this setup order

1. Create year groups where they are useful for grouping classes and reporting.
2. Create each class and attach it to a year group, or leave it ungrouped.
3. Set the working week so Makatib.App knows when registers are expected.
4. Add academic terms with accurate start and end dates.
5. Manage current student and teacher assignments from Admin → Classes.
6. Configure the books, subjects and teaching labels used by those classes.

Year groups and classes

A year group is an optional organisational level; a class is the working group used for registers, teaching assignments and communication. Use names staff and families will recognise. Renaming changes the displayed name without inventing a new historical class.

Structure creates and names these containers; it does not manage their rosters. Open a class card or go to Admin → Classes when you need to see its students and teachers. The full workflow is in Managing classes & rollover.

Working days

Select the days on which the madrassa normally teaches. Classes inherit this default, and a class with a different recurring timetable can set its own week from Admin → Classes. Working-week changes take effect from today: they do not rewrite earlier reports. Returning a class to Use madrassa default ends its custom week from today, while its earlier schedule remains part of the reporting history. Attendance reporting resolves the week that applied on each historical date before it identifies registers that should have been submitted. For a weekend school, select Saturday and/or Sunday only. Use a teaching exception for a closure or other one-off date.

Academic terms

Give each term a name, start date and end date. The term containing today becomes the current reporting period for relevant summaries. Editing a term changes the window used to group records; it does not delete attendance, progress, tasks or enrolment history.

Teacher and student placement

Use Admin → Classes to move a whole selection of students, add unassigned students and maintain the class's teachers. Individual student and teacher records can still update one person at a time. A teacher can have several classes and a class can have several teachers. When moving people, update the current assignment rather than renaming the old class into the new one.

Terms and academic-year planning are different

Terms are dated reporting periods. The Classes workspace can also hold one draft for the next set of rosters, often named for an academic year, but that name does not create a formal academic-year record. If you report across a full year, create a term with the dates you require. Publish a rollover only when its proposed student and teacher assignments should replace the live ones.

Teaching settings and Hifz labels

Education settings control the Quran books and subject lessons offered to teachers. Hifz labels can be changed from Sabaq, Sabqi and Manzil to the terminology your madrassa uses; the underlying three-part workflow remains the same. See Setting up lessons, books & subjects for the detailed curriculum flow.

Check the effect of a change

After changing structure, confirm one teacher's class list, one student record and the relevant report filter. That quick check catches most assignment or naming mistakes before the next lesson.