Setup

Academic setup

This page is the shape of your school for one year: which classes run, in which sections, and who teaches each one. Do this first. Nothing else in Vidya Sethu works until it is done.

Watch

2 minutes 33 seconds.

0:09 The page
0:15 The five steps
0:19 The academic year
0:25 Looking at another year
0:32 Starting the next year
0:39 Adding a class
0:47 Adding a section
0:55 The grid
1:07 Making a class-section
1:16 The class teacher
1:25 Filling a year in one go

Three words to know

The whole page rests on these. They are easy to mix up.

Word	What it means	Example
Class	A year group. One row in the grid.	LKG, Class 1, Class 10
Section	A division inside a class. One column in the grid.	A and B, or Beryl and Diamond
Class-section	The two together. This is the real room of children. It has a register, subjects, a timetable and a class teacher.	Class 1 – B

The simple rule

A class on its own holds nobody. A section on its own holds nobody. A student sits in a class-section. That is why the grid exists: it is where you make them.

The five steps

At the top of the page there are five boxes. A green tick means that step is done. An amber warning means something is still missing, and the box says what.

1Academic year. At least one year exists, and one of them is marked as the current year.
2Classes. The year has classes.
3Sections. The year has sections.
4Class-sections. The boxes in the grid are made. It tells you how many are still empty.
5Class teachers. Every class-section has a teacher in charge of it.

Work down the list. Each step needs the one before it.

The academic year

Everything on this page belongs to one academic year. The year is shown at the top, with a Current badge on the one the school is in now.

The dropdown next to it lets you look at another year — last year's classes, or next year's, if you have started it. Looking changes nothing. You are just reading.

Why this matters

Classes and sections belong to a year, not to the school. Class 11 exists in the years it actually ran, and in no others. This is what lets a school stop running a class without deleting its history: last year's register, marks and fees stay exactly where they are.

Classes

Press + Class and type the name. Use the name your school actually says out loud — LKG, Class 1, Grade 6. It appears on report cards and on the school's own website, so spell it the way parents will expect.

A new class goes to the end of the list. The small arrows on the left of each row move it up or down. That order is the order students and parents see everywhere else, so put LKG before Class 1.

Sections

Press + Section and type the name — A, B, or names like Beryl and Diamond. A section you add is available to every class in that year. It does not create anything on its own; it only adds a column to the grid.

You do not need the same sections everywhere

Adding a section gives every class the option of it. Whether a class actually runs it is decided in the grid. A school can have four sections in Class 1 and two in Class 10.

The grid

Classes go down the side. Sections go across the top. Each box is one class-section.

A filled boxshows how many students are in it and who the class teacher is. Click it to open.
An empty boxmeans that class does not run that section. Click the plus to create it.

When a class or a section is new, the boxes for it are empty until you make them. The checklist counts them for you — 4 not created yet — and a button appears toCreate all 4 missing at once. There is also a fill column link under each section heading, which does the same for one column.

Careful with create all

It makes every empty box in the year, for every class. That is exactly right in a new year when the whole school is being laid out. It is the wrong button if only some classes run some sections — make those boxes one at a time instead.

Opening a class-section

Click any box in the grid and a panel opens on the right. This is that one class-section, and almost everything about it is reached from here.

At the top it tells you two things before you change anything:

How many students are in it right now
Which academic year it belongs to — useful when you are looking at an old year

Class teacher

Until you pick someone it reads — nobody yet —. This is not a label. The class teacher:

marks that section's register, and sees it on their own dashboard each morning
decides that section's students' leave applications
sees every subject's marks for the section, not only the ones they teach
finalizes the section at the end of a term, and releases its results to parents

A section with no class teacher

Step 5 of the checklist stays amber until every box has one. Nobody is responsible for that register, and nobody can release those results — the work simply waits.

Room number

Optional, and only a label — 6A, Ground floor lab. It is shown on the timetable so people know where to go. Nothing depends on it.

The three links

Under Go to are the rest of that section's setup, each already filtered to it:

Link	What you do there
Students in this section	See who is in it, add a student, or move one to another section.
Subjects & subject teachers	Choose which subjects this section is taught, and who teaches each one. The timetable and the gradebook both read this.
Timetable	Place this section's week, period by period.

The order that works

Subjects before timetable. A period is a subject in a slot, and a subject carries its own teacher — so until the section has subjects with teachers, there is nothing to place.

Deleting a class-section

At the bottom, in red. It does not happen straight away. First it counts exactly what would go with it, and shows you the four numbers:

Delete Class 11 – Ruby?

Enrolled students	0
Attendance records	0
Timetable periods	0
Subject assignments	0

All zero means nothing is attached and it is safe to remove. If any number is not zero it turns red, and the message above says what would be lost in plain words.

Move the students first

If students are in it, take them out before you delete — Students → ⋯ → Change section. Deleting does not delete the students themselves; it deletes the record of where they sat, along with that section's registers and timetable. That cannot be undone.

Fee bills already raised are not affected. A bill belongs to the student who owes it, not to the class it was priced from.

Starting a new year

Press New year and give it a name and its dates. The new year opens empty: no classes, no sections, no class-sections. Last year's stay in last year, untouched.

This is deliberate, and it is how the history stays safe. To set the new year up:

Add the classes the school will run this year
Add the sections
Use Create all … missing to make the grid in one go
Open each box and set its class teacher
Move the students across from Students → ⋯ → Change section

What order to do this in

Everything else in Vidya Sethu hangs off a class-section. In order:

Do this	Before you can
Academic setup	add students, subjects, a timetable or marks
Subjects	give teachers something to mark
Timetable	take a register by period, or arrange cover
Students	take attendance or raise a fee
Grading terms	enter any marks at all

Changing things later

Hover over a class or section name and a pencil appears. Renaming is safe: everything attached to it follows the new name, because the records point at the thing, not at its spelling.

Deleting

Deleting a class or a section is not the same as renaming. Before it happens, Vidya Sethu counts what would go with it — the students' place in it, its registers, its timetable periods — and tells you. Fee bills already raised are not lost: a bill belongs to the student who owes it, not to the class it was priced from.

If a class simply is not running this year, do not delete it. Start a new year instead and leave it out. The old year keeps its history.

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