School Structure

Use the following options in the main menu under Admin > School Admin to set up basic structures in your school.

Years, Days & Times

1. Manage School Years - almost all of Gibbon's functionality is reliant on the concept of a school or academic year: this helps you see only the information that is relevant in many views. To function your system needs a "Current" school year, and can have any number of "Past" and "Upcoming" years. Each school year has a unique "sequence number", which shows how it is ordered in relation to other years.
2. Manage Days of the Week - here you can turn on or off individual days in the week, as well as setting start and end times for your various school days.
3. Manage Terms - if your school year is divided into terms or semesters, you should create one entry here for each term. Otherwise, just create a single term the same length as your school year.
4. Manage Special Days - here you can specify public holidays, mid-term breaks and other school closures. This is important as it helps determine whether things like school attendance should be enabled on any given day.

Groupings

1. Manage Year Groups - year groups represent the way that schools divides students on the basis of age. By default, Gibbon ships with Years 7-13 preset. Use this area to add, edit and delete school years. Each year group has a unique "sequence number", which shows how it is ordered in relation to other year groups.
2. Manage Form Group - form groups (aka roll groups, home room, tutor groups) are the groups in which students have their attendance taken and/or receive pastoral care. Roll groups can contain students from a single year group, or can be mixed across years.
3. Manage Departments - departments, which can be either learning areas or administrative, represent staff groupings. These are mainly used in the Planner, Departments and Library modules. To make use of this area, you will most likely want to added staff to your school (see below).

Others

1. Manage Spaces - spaces are any areas in your school that you might want to use in the timetable, including classrooms, labs, offices, sports facilities, etc.

The other settings in School Admin are not so fundamental to the running of a school, and so will not be covered here. Mostly, these are used to control the functioning of single module (e.g. Manage Student Settings).