Report cards workflow

This runs once per class per term, in the last week of the term after teaching stops and marking finishes. The order matters more here than anywhere else in the academic modules, because publish is the point at which numbers become frozen and visible to families. Everything before publish is reversible and invisible to them; everything after leaves an audit record and a notification.

A card is assembled from published assessments dated inside the term, so the term boundaries on the Terms tab at /academic-calendar decide what is included. Get those dates right first. An assessment dated a day after the term ends will not appear on the card, and no error is raised - the subject simply shows as having no data, which then blocks publish.

Setup workflow

1. Confirm term start and end dates for the academic year on the Terms tab at /academic-calendar.
2. Publish every term assessment at /grades; drafts are excluded from the card and will be reported as missing marks.
3. Publish exam paper results so their linked assessments carry marks, since an exam paper published without marks seeds empty rows that block the class.
4. Confirm the grading scale and pass threshold at /settings/grading-scale before you publish anything - changing it later splits the year into cards graded under two scales.
5. Check class and co-class teachers are assigned, because remarks are written by homeroom staff.

Usage workflow

1. Open /grades/report-cards and select the term and class.
2. The class teacher writes one remark per student; saving a remark creates the draft card row if it does not exist yet.
3. Read the publish readiness panel - it lists every student who is missing a subject and shows how many students and parents will be notified.
4. Preview a card at /grades/report-cards/preview/[studentId]/[termId]; before publish this renders live data, after publish it renders the frozen snapshot.
5. Leadership publishes the class. Each student gets a per-subject snapshot plus totals, percentage, grade and remark, and the card flips to published.
6. Families are notified and the card appears at /my-grades and /parent-dashboard/grades?childId=.
7. After a mark correction, amend the card: it re-assembles, writes a fresh snapshot, increments the revision and notifies families that it was updated.

Who does which step

What breaks if you skip or reorder

• Publishing before marking finishes: the request is refused and names every student and subject still missing a mark, so there is no partial publish.
• Changing the grading scale between two classes: published cards keep their frozen letters, so the earlier class is graded on the old bands and the later one on the new. Amend the earlier class if they must agree.
• Correcting a mark after publish without amending: downloads keep serving the old snapshot, and the family never sees the correction.
• Unpublishing to hide a mistake: the card disappears from portals but the snapshot and audit entry remain, so the history is still there when you republish.

Handoff and limits

The workflow reads from the gradebook and the attendance register and hands off to the student and parent portals plus the notification channel. It writes nothing back into marks. Every publish, republish and unpublish appends an audit row carrying the actor, the revision and the previous snapshot, which is what the History view on the report cards panel reads.

• Bulk PDF generation is limited to 80 students per request; a ZIP option produces one file per student for mailroom work.
• There is no scheduled publish - somebody with leadership access has to press the button.
• The snapshot does not store attendance, so a PDF regenerated from a published card reports zero attendance days.