Curriculum setup and usage

Curriculum is the first academic module to configure in a new year, ahead of the timetable and long before the first exam paper is written. A syllabus row is unique per class, subject and academic year, so the year has to exist before anything else can be attached to it. Everything downstream reads that one row: weekly lesson plans, the topic list a paper blueprint snapshots, teaching progress, and what a learner sees on their portal.

The step that most often goes wrong is pacing. Lesson plan generation does not spread topics evenly across calendar weeks - it reads the academic calendar day by day, discards individual holidays, seasonal holidays and weekend days, groups what is left into Monday-start instructional weeks, and hands each week a share of the topic list proportional to its working days. A term with a two-week seasonal break therefore produces fewer plans, automatically. Configure the calendar at /academic-calendar and generate calendar days before you generate plans.

Prerequisites

• An academic year with calendar days generated at /academic-calendar - generation returns a 400 with "No instructional days found" when the calendar is empty.
• Subjects defined at /subjects and classes carrying active student memberships.
• Active teacher assignments per class-subject at /teachers/assignments - these decide who may edit a syllabus and who receives generated lesson plans.
• Optional: prescribed textbooks catalogued at /books so a syllabus can point at a CurriculumBook instead of retyping titles.

Setup workflow

1. Open /syllabus and create one syllabus per class-subject for the active academic year; a duplicate for the same class, subject and year is rejected, so edit the existing row instead.
2. Pick a template (CBSE_NCERT, ICSE or IB) or leave it blank for a custom outline - the body is stored as JSON chapters, each holding ordered topics.
3. Build chapters and topics at /syllabus/[id], and attach prescribed and reference books, marking one as primary.
4. Map period load at /timetable/curriculum so the timetable generator knows how many periods a week each class-subject needs.

Usage workflow

1. Teachers plan week by week at /lesson-plans, or generate a whole year from the syllabus in one pass.
2. Generated plans land as DRAFT with approval PENDING; class-subjects with no syllabus content are skipped, and weeks that already hold a plan are left alone unless you choose overwrite.
3. Leadership approves or rejects plans, storing the approver and an optional comment; teachers see and edit only their own plans.
4. Upload resources at /study-materials against a class grade, optionally narrowed to a class, section, stream or subject; detail and downloads live at /study-materials/[id].
5. Teachers tick topics complete on the syllabus checklist; marking a lesson plan COMPLETED also counts its linked topics towards coverage.
6. Students read /my-syllabus with their elective choices; parents read /parent-dashboard/syllabus?childId= for the selected child.

Who owns what

What breaks if you skip a step

• No calendar days: lesson plan generation refuses to run and tells you to generate the academic calendar and holidays first.
• No active teacher assignments: generation returns a 404 because there is nothing to generate against, and the teacher cannot edit the syllabus either.
• Empty syllabus content: that class-subject is silently skipped and counted as skipped in the response, so a partial run is easy to miss.
• Study material saved without a class grade filter: it becomes visible to every learner in that grade, not only the intended section.

Handoff and limits

Curriculum feeds examinations rather than the other way round. When a paper blueprint is created it snapshots the chosen curriculum topics into its own record and keeps a reference to the source syllabus, so later curriculum edits cannot rewrite a locked blueprint. Curriculum also feeds the timetable through the period map at /timetable/curriculum. It does not feed the gradebook: syllabus coverage and lesson plan status are teaching records, and no mark is derived from them.

• Syllabus content has no versioning or approval workflow of its own - only lesson plans carry an approval status.
• Topic coverage is tracked per teacher, so two teachers sharing a class-subject keep separate checklists.
• There is no automatic warning when a class falls behind the generated pacing; compare coverage against the plan yourself.