Building your curriculum (Curriculum view)

The Curriculum view is where your school defines what is taught in each subject and grade: the units for each term, the topics inside them, the objectives students should reach, and the activities and assessment that go with each objective. Once a curriculum is Published, classrooms follow it, teachers plan lessons from it, and students and parents see it on their course outline.

Who can use it: principals, administrators, school leadership and heads of department. Heads of department see and edit curricula for their own department's subjects only. Other teachers see Access denied.

Open the Curriculum view

Principals and administrators: choose Curriculum in the main menu.
Heads of department: choose My Department › Curriculum, or the Curriculum tab on your department page.

The list shows every curriculum with its subject, grade, year, title, status and counts of units, topics, objectives and classrooms following it. Use the filters at the top to narrow by subject, grade, year or status, or search by title.

Create a curriculum

You have two ways to start:

Start from NSC — copy a Ministry of Education National Standards Curriculum guide into your school as a Draft. This is the quickest route for Grades 7–9. See Starting from the National Standards Curriculum (NSC).
New curriculum — start from a blank curriculum and build it yourself.

Fill in the Overview

Choose New curriculum. The curriculum opens on the Overview tab.
Select the Subject and Grade level.
Choose an Academic year, or leave it as Any year. An "Any year" curriculum is the one a class falls back to when there is no copy for its own year.
Give it a Title and, if you like, a Description.
Select Save. The Units and Topics & objectives tabs unlock once the curriculum is saved.

Build the content

A curriculum is organised as Unit › Topic › Sub-topic › Objective. Each objective can carry its own activities and assessment.

Units

A unit is a block of work within a term.

Open the Units tab and choose Add unit.
Enter the Term, Unit number, Name and Duration (weeks, lessons or hours), and choose a Strand if your subject uses them.
Add the unit's supporting information: Overview, Prior learning, Career links, Cross-curricular links and Resources. Teachers see all of this when they plan a lesson in the unit.

Topics, sub-topics and objectives

Open the Topics & objectives tab and pick a unit.
Choose Add topic, then Add sub-topic under it.
Under each sub-topic, choose Add objective. Give each objective a short code if you use them (for example G7.T1.U1.3) and write what students will be able to do.
Under an objective, use Add activity for suggested teaching and learning activities (with an optional phase such as Engagement or Exploration) and Add assessment for how the objective is assessed.

Select the save icon on a row to save it, and use the up and down arrows to change the order of units, topics, objectives, activities and assessments.

Preview

The Preview tab shows the whole curriculum the way it reads end to end, term by term — handy for a final check or for sharing with your department before you publish.

Publish it

A curriculum has one of three statuses:

Draft — only visible on this screen. Use it while you're building.
Published — classrooms can follow it, teachers can plan against it, and it appears on the student and parent course outline.
Archived — kept for history but not offered to any new class.

Set the Status on the Overview tab and select Save.

Choose which classrooms follow it

Most of the time you don't need to do anything: a class is auto-matched to the published curriculum for its subject, its grade level and its academic year (or the "Any year" copy if there is no copy for that year).

Use the Classrooms tab when you want to be explicit:

Open the curriculum and choose the Classrooms tab.
Pick the year. Each class shows its teacher, grade and state: Assigned, Auto-matched, Follows another or Not following.
Tick the classes and choose Assign selected to pin them to this curriculum, or Unassign selected to release them.

Pinning is useful when a class should follow a different year's copy, or when you don't want a class to switch if another curriculum is published later. The first lesson plan a teacher saves against a curriculum also pins that class to it.

Copy a curriculum into a new year

In the list, select the Copy to another year icon on the curriculum's row. Pick the academic year for the copy (or leave it blank for "Any year"). You get a Draft copy with every unit, topic, objective, activity and assessment — adjust it, then publish.

Common questions

A teacher says their class has no curriculum.
Check that a curriculum for that subject and grade is Published and that its academic year matches the class's year (or is set to Any year). You can also assign the class directly on the Classrooms tab.

Can I delete a curriculum that classes follow?
No — unassign the classes first, or set the curriculum to Archived to keep its history.

Will editing a published curriculum affect existing lesson plans?
Lesson plans keep their links to the units, topics and objectives they were placed in. Adding content is safe at any time. Deleting an objective removes it from the coverage of any plans that ticked it. A unit or topic that lesson plans are placed in can't be deleted — rename or re-word it instead.