Decide what each class learns this session. In one screen, in any language.

Why Indian schools need a session-wise subject offering screen

It is mid-March at a CBSE school in Lucknow. The new academic session starts in three weeks. The principal calls in the academic head and asks: which subjects is every class offering this year? The list from last year sits in a printed PDF on the office table. Class 9 added French two years ago — is it still running? Class 11 PCM has the new Applied Mathematics — is it on the report card or only as an additional subject? Three teachers want to know which sections they are teaching, the IT person needs to upload the subject list to the marksheet template, and the printer of the school diary is asking for the subject names by Friday.

The cost of getting this wrong is not abstract. If a subject is missing from the offering, the marksheet template will not include it and the teacher cannot enter marks. If display order is wrong, the report card shows English before Hindi for the Hindi-medium section — a parent complaint waiting to happen. If a co-scholastic subject is left active by mistake, every section gets it on the timetable. Fix it later and three downstream modules — exams, attendance, gradebook — drift out of sync. CBSE affiliation paperwork expects a subject list per class signed off before the session begins.

Inkwelly Subject Offerings is the one place every academic office decides what each class will study this session. Set up once at session start, override during the year if needed, and feed everything else — Teaching Batches, Subject Groups, the marksheet generator and the timetable — automatically.

How Subject Offerings actually works

At the start of every academic session, the academic head opens Academics → Subjects → Subject Offerings and sees the master subject catalogue your school has built up over the years. This catalogue lives at the organization level — once English, Hindi, Mathematics, Science, Sanskrit, Computer Applications and the rest are added, they are reusable across every school year and every branch in your trust.

For the new session, you tick the subjects you actually want to run. Class 11 Science PCM offers Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, English Core, Physical Education and an optional sixth subject. Class 11 Commerce offers Accountancy, Business Studies, Economics, English Core, Mathematics or Informatics Practices. The same screen shows the assessment mode for each subject — Marks Based, Grade Based, Rubric Based, Portfolio, Descriptive, Competency Based, Qualitative, or Mixed — and the assessment structure flags (Theory, Practical, Internal) so the marksheet template generator can plan columns automatically.

Each offering carries a displayOrder so report cards always print in the order the school wants — most schools want languages first, then core academics, then co-scholastic. An isActive toggle lets you disable a subject mid-year without deleting any history. From there, every downstream module — Teaching Batches, Marks Entry, Exams, Marksheet, Timetable — reads from this screen. No second source of truth, no Excel sheet circulating in WhatsApp.

See it in action

“Pehle Class 11 Commerce ke liye subjects manually 4 jagah type karte the — admission form, marksheet template, timetable, parent app. Ab session start hote hi ek baar Subject Offerings me daalte hain, baaki sab apne aap ho jata hai.”

Real-world scenarios from Indian schools

1. New CBSE affiliation, K–12 from scratch. A new branch opens in Pune in March 2026. The academic head adds 38 subjects to the org catalogue, opens Subject Offerings for the first session, bulk-adds all 38 with starting display order 10 and auto-increment, then turns off the four subjects that only Classes 6–8 will run. Total time: 22 minutes. CBSE affiliation paperwork prints from the marksheet generator the same evening.

2. Mid-year subject swap in Class 11 Commerce. Three students in Class 11 Commerce A want to drop Informatics Practices and move to Mathematics. The academic head leaves Informatics Practices active for the rest of the section but creates a new teaching batch of Mathematics for those three students. Subject offering stays untouched; the move shows up in the gradebook the next day.

3. Hindi-medium school running mixed Anglo + Hindi report cards. A Sanskrit + English + Hindi school in Bhopal sets display order: Hindi (10), English (20), Sanskrit (30), Mathematics (40), Science (50), Social Studies (60), Computer Applications (70), Art (80), PE (90), Work Experience (100). Parent app and report card pick up nameI18n and render in the right script per parent.

4. ICSE school adding a new optional subject mid-year. Class 9 wants to add Mass Media & Communication mid-September. The academic head creates the subject in the org catalogue, then enables it as an offering for Session 2026-27 only — last year's offerings stay untouched. Audit log captures the addition with the user and timestamp; CBSE/ICSE inspection has full provenance.

5. State Board school scaling from 1 branch to 4. A UP Board trust based in Bahraich opens 3 more branches across the district. The org catalogue is shared. Each branch principal opens Subject Offerings for their own school and ticks the subjects relevant to their student strength — branch 1 runs Sanskrit, branch 4 does not. Same catalogue, different per-school decisions, all auditable from the org dashboard.

See Subject Offerings on real CBSE and State Board data

30-minute walkthrough on a real Indian school session setup. We show you bulk add, multilingual rendering, and how it feeds the marksheet generator end to end.

Limits, safety and the small print

Maximum offerings per session. No hard cap, but production schools comfortably run 60+ offerings (large IGCSE K–12 with primary + secondary mixed). Beyond 100 offerings, the bulk-add wizard chunks the create into batches of 50 to avoid Postgres long transactions.

Subject is immutable after creation. Once a subject offering is created and any student or teaching batch references it, the subjectId cannot be changed — only displayOrder and isActive. To replace a subject, create a new offering and disable the old one. This protects mark history and audit integrity.

Deletion is blocked when teaching batches exist. The API returns SUBJECT_OFFERING_HAS_BATCHES (HTTP 400) if you try to delete an offering that any teaching batch is using. Disable instead — the offering disappears from new marksheets but historical data stays intact for parent-app, transcript and inspection use cases.

Duplicate prevention. A subject can only be offered once per session per school — SUBJECT_OFFERING_ALREADY_EXISTS (HTTP 409) blocks accidental duplicates. The Bulk Add wizard skips duplicates with a per-row reason so a 60-subject bulk import never half-fails.

Multilingual rendering uses nameI18n on the underlying subject. The offering itself does not store its own translations — by design. Update the subject name once at the org level and every school-level offering picks up the new name. Brand-protected names (English, CBSE, ICSE) stay in English script across all locales.

Permissions. Only roles with academics.subject_offerings.write can enable, disable or bulk-add. Teachers see offerings read-only on their teaching dashboard. The role is part of the Identity & Access Management module so a Principal can grant a temporary academic-head role to the new IT person without giving full school admin access.