Before undertaking the next step – identifying the groups of pupils to be examined – it is vital to ensure that the information in the database is as accurate as possible. When you add pupils, the system looks to your curriculum and populates the pupils on the basis of what it finds. Where you are using SchoolBase® for your timetable, reports and the like, it is highly likely that the curriculum will be correct. If, as is the case with some schools, you are not using the system for this purpose we would strongly advise that you check the curriculum first. A good idea is to send each Head of Department a list of the pupils who are supposed to be in their examination groups and get them to confirm in writing that the lists are correct.

Having checked as carefully as you can, you can now proceed with identifying the groups of pupils who are going to be examined. You create one or more examination sets, one for each type of examination. Within each set you select one or more year groups, e. g. for GCE you will need Year 12 and Year 13 (or whatever you call them). You create the teaching groups within that year, delete any which are not to be examined and add any where, for example, a group will enter for more than one examination. Finally you allocate the pupils. Let us now deal with each of these in detail.

1. Create a new exam set. The button for this is arrowed in the illustration above. The School exam set no. is wholly automatic.

2. Select the series, month, year and type, and ensure you have the right academic year – this last is important when linking the curriculum.

3. The exam name, a name for this header, is automatically created from the series and type,

you can manually edit this if you wish, to make it more informative for you.

4. Choose the method of entry, either Group entry or Subject entry. For the main exam sessions it make sense to use the curriculum based model where entries are made for each teaching group. However, where there is only a small number of entries it can be easier to make each entry individually a subject at a time. The choice of which system to use is made when you create the Exam Header using the buttons at top right. Do not try to switch between these options at a later stage. Each header can only use Group OR subject entry, not a mixture of both.

The two tick boxes (Release to Parents and Release to Pupils) affect SchoolBase® OnLine and enable you to control when parents and/or pupils will be able to see what entries have been made for them.

The last tick box, Release Results, gives you the opportunity to show or hide results for individual headers. Hiding results is needed on the day the results come out, as pupils and teachers are not allowed to see them until the day after the electronic release of the results to schools. By using these tickboxes, rather than the ‘Switch off exam results’ System Variable, you can hide only the new results, allowing pupils and teachers to still see the results achieved in previous exam series. Results will only be shown in SchoolBase® Online and the External Exams tab of the pupil record if this is ticked for the set where the entries were made. Entries not made using SchoolBase® cannot be switched off in this way.