Mar 17, 2022
The school year levels are a bit like a spider web, they have connections to many areas within different SOBS applications. Any change to the year levels setup will potentially have “knock-on” effects to each of the applications, so, before you rush into making lots of changes it would be a good idea to seek some guidance.
Setting and updating year level information
- Log in as a SOBS Administrator
- Click on your school name (bottom left) and then on “School configuration”
- In the top menu select “Year levels”
- Click the “Edit” button to edit the year levels
How Year Levels work in SOBS
When you first configure year levels for your school you are prompted with a list of year levels similar to this screenshot on the right. We pre-populate some year level descriptions.
For most schools you will simply click (toggle) the relevant switches to enable specific year levels for your school. In most cases these year levels will be consecutive (that is, the appear one after the other in the list). For most schools your task finishes here.
If your school is unable to select consecutive year levels then you can edit the year level descriptions on this page. You will still use the toggle switch to enable the year levels you want.
It is important to ensure the year levels you select are consecutive entries in this list, and that they are in sequential year level order. That means that Yr1 will be on the line before Yr2, and Yr2 on the line before Yr3. The reason for this is that at the beginning of each school year (using the date identified at the bottom of the dialog) SOBS will automatically bump students from their current year level to the next year level in this list.
For example, if we enabled all of the current options displayed, and a student was added to “Kindy”, at the beginning of the next school year this student would be automatically bumped to “Pre-Prep”, and the following year they would be bumped to “Prep”and then “Yr1” etc.
The second important point to remember is that staff and students are connected to the line in this list, they are not connected to the description. So, a student in “Kindy” is connected to the first line in this list, so if we were to change the first line description to “Yr1”, the student would suddenly be in “Yr1”.
This means we can’t simply adjust the year level descriptions without causing a significant impact to the current usage of these year levels within the SOBS applications.
What this does mean, is that if you are setting up these year levels for a school that is just starting with SOBS, then you do have some freedom to move the list around. Although, these should still be valid year levels, and they still need to be in consecutive order.
Links to SOBS applications
These are some of the locations within SOBS where these year levels are connected:
- Parent Booking: Booking rounds are often valid for particular student year levels.
- Parent Booking: When the parent enters student details they select a year level from this list.
- Parent Booking: When staff mark year levels they teach, this is the list of year levels to select from.
- School Notices: Some Groups have a specific year level identified.
- Applications that use: Student year levels (these would be set correctly when re-importing the student data)
- Subject Selection: Selection rounds are valid for particular year levels.
- Enrolment: When students identify the year level they are enrolling for.