The new curriculum did not simply add a few assessments. It changed what a mark is — and most school software is still printing the old kind.
Under the old arrangement a term was three sittings: beginning of term, mid term, end of term. Each produced a percentage per subject, the three were averaged, and the average went on the card with a grade beside it. A report card was a table of about a dozen rows and four columns, and everybody who read one already knew how.
The lower secondary curriculum keeps those sittings and adds something that does not behave like them at all: Activities of Integration.
It is a task a learner works through, and what the teacher records is not a mark out of a hundred. It is an identifier — 0, 1, 2 or 3 — describing how far the learner got:
Two things follow, and both of them break software written for the old shape.
The first is that a 2 is not 67%. It is a band, and averaging bands as though they were percentages produces a number that looks like a mark and means nothing. A system that quietly converts identifiers to percentages so they fit its existing columns is not recording the curriculum; it is recording something else and calling it the curriculum.
The second is the one nobody warns a school about: there are a great many of them.
An Activity of Integration is per topic, not per term. A subject may run several in a term; a learner takes a dozen or more subjects. We have watched a single term produce thirty-nine of them for one child.
Printed the obvious way — one column per assessment, which is exactly what the old shape does — that is a report card thirty-nine columns wide. On A4 it is unreadable. The school is then left choosing between two bad options: put everything on and hand parents a document nobody can read, or leave things off and hand them an incomplete record.
This is the actual problem the new curriculum creates for a school office, and it is a layout problem rather than an assessment one. It is also entirely solvable, which is why it is worth naming.
Collapse them. The Activities of Integration for a subject belong together as a group, not as thirty-nine separate facts:
The result is a card a parent can read in the same shape they have read for twenty years, carrying information the old card could not hold.
A school chooses how much of a term's result comes from which sitting — 20% beginning of term and 80% end of term, or an even third each, or something else. That is a decision for the Director of Studies, and it must be a setting rather than a rebuild. When the weights change, every card behind them should change with them.
A blank is not a zero. A learner who missed a paper has no result for it; a learner who sat it and scored nothing has a result of nothing. Software that stores both as 0 destroys the difference, and the difference is what a parent is asking about. The average should be taken over the subjects a learner takes, so that sitting one paper out of nine does not flatter a candidate into first place.
If you are looking at school software this term, these are the questions that separate a system built for this curriculum from one adapted to it:
A supplier who has met the curriculum will answer all five without hesitating. One who has not will talk about how customisable the system is.
School MIS records Activities of Integration on the identifier scale and collapses them per subject, so a term of thirty-nine still prints on a card a parent can read. You can look through a whole demonstration school without asking anybody.
See how it works