Promotions and certificates

Move students into next year’s sections and issue transfer and bonafide certificates: the two promotion screens, what each decision does to a record, and the numbering rules.

Students & families guide for day and boarding schools.

Last updated August 29, 2026

These are the two things a school does at the end of an academic year: move everyone into next year’s sections, and hand out the paperwork for those who are leaving or need proof of enrolment. Both are limited to Platform Admin, Principal, and Vice Principal, both are irreversible in practice, and both depend on the next academic year and its classes already existing. Build those first at /academic-year and /classes.

The four promotion decisions

Decision	Effect on the roster
Promoted	Source membership marked PROMOTED; a new active membership is created in the target class for the target year; grade, section, and stream on the student record are updated.
Retained	Source membership marked RETAINED; a new active membership is created in the same class for the target year, so the student repeats the year in place.
Excluded	Source membership set to DROPPED with today as the exit date. No membership is created for the next year, and the student account itself is untouched.
Passed out	Recorded in the ledger as the leaving decision. It carries no target class, so it is never applied as a move — handle the actual exit with a transfer certificate and, where appropriate, deactivation on the student profile.

One decision is stored per student per source year, so re-running the tool updates the existing row rather than creating a duplicate. Only promoted and retained rows show as pending work in the ledger; a row that has been applied shows the date it was applied, and rows without a target academic year or target class cannot be applied at all.

Running the promotion

Create the next academic year with its terms at /academic-year, and make sure every destination class exists at /classes.
Open the promotion tool from /classes, choose the source and target academic years, and map each class to the class its students move into.
Mark the exceptions — students to retain and students to exclude — before running, because the move is applied per class in a single pass.
Run Promote All. The response reports how many students were promoted, retained, and excluded.
Review /students/promotions afterwards and apply anything still pending, one row at a time or all at once.
Coordinate the wider close-out at /academic-year/rollover.

Certificates

/students/certificates issues transfer and bonafide certificates. Choose the type, search the student, add a reason, and optionally tie the certificate to a class and academic year so those details print. The certificate number is generated for you with a TC or BON prefix and is unique; the issuing user and the issue date are recorded automatically and the issuance is written to the audit trail.

For a cohort, add students to the batch queue and issue the whole queue with one type and reason. Failures are reported per student and the successful ones are still issued.
Select issued certificates and download them together as certificates.zip; single certificates download as their own PDF.
The school name and address printed on the certificate come from the active school record, so check those before a large batch.

Common questions

Quick answers in plain language.

What is the difference between the promotion tool on /classes and the ledger at /students/promotions?+

The tool on /classes runs the bulk move: pick the source and target academic year, map each class to next year’s class, and promote the whole cohort in one pass. The ledger at /students/promotions is the per-student record of what was decided, where you can apply an individual pending row or apply all of them. Both call the same promotion endpoint.

What actually changes in the database when a student is promoted?+

The existing class membership for the source year is marked PROMOTED, a new active membership is created in the target class for the target year, and the grade, section, and stream on the student record are updated to the new class. A retained student keeps the same class and gets a new active membership for the next year instead. An excluded student’s membership is dropped with an exit date and no new membership is created.

Which certificate types can Schoolyi issue?+

Two: transfer certificate and bonafide. Each is a generated PDF with an automatic certificate number prefixed TC or BON, stamped with the issuing user and date. There is no custom template builder — the reason field and the linked class and academic year are what vary between certificates.

Can an incorrectly issued certificate be cancelled?+

Not from the interface. Issuance is recorded in the audit trail and the certificate number is permanent, so the practical remedy is to issue a corrected certificate and keep a note of why. Check the student, type, and reason before issuing, particularly in a batch.