How to prepare for a new term
What to have ready before week one, and the order to do it in.
Francisca Akoto · September 11, 2026 · 6 min read
The first week of term is the one week where the paperwork cannot be done in the evenings. The class arrives on the Tuesday, and most of what you need was due before then.
This is the order to work in, and what each piece actually requires. If you are reading it in week three, skip to the last section.
1. Know how long the term is
The GES calendar for 2026/2027 opens the first term on 8 September and closes it on 17 December. That is 15 weeks, with a two-day mid-term break on 5 and 6 November.
The number that matters for planning is smaller. The last week of term is examinations and the week before it is revision, so you are placing new content in 13 weeks, not 15. Plenty of teachers also spend week one settling the class and going over last term rather than starting new content, which takes it to 12.
The full counting, term by term, is in how to write a scheme of work.
2. Work backwards from vetting, not from day one
Vetting happens before you teach, not after. Your headteacher signs the week ahead, which means week one notes are due in week zero, and every following week is due before it starts.
This is the deadline that orders everything else on this page. A scheme written in week two is late for a note that was vetted in week one. What a headteacher checks, and how to clear it in one pass, is set out in getting your notes to pass vetting the first time, along with the other books an appraiser works through while your notes are open in front of them.
3. Count what you are actually carrying
A scheme of work covers one subject for one class. That single sentence decides how big your term-start job is, and it is why two teachers in the same staff room face completely different weeks.
Here is what each of them is holding, counted from the curriculum itself.
| What you carry | Schemes to write | Indicators for the year | Per teaching week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic 4, the full curriculum | 10 | 543 | about 16 |
| Basic 4, without French and Ghanaian Language | 8 | 361 | about 10 |
| Mathematics, Basic 7 to 9 | 3 | 184 | about 5 |
| English Language, Basic 7 to 9 | 3 | 154 | about 4 |
The Mathematics teacher covers three classes and writes three schemes, and the job repeats with different content each time. The Basic 4 class teacher writes eight or ten, and they are not variations of one job: Basic 4 English carries 131 indicators for the year and Basic 4 History carries 11, so the pacing that works for one is wrong for the other by a wide margin.
The class teacher is carrying roughly twice the curriculum of the subject teacher, spread across three times as many documents. It is also heavier further up primary: Basic 1 carries 295 indicators across eight subjects, Basic 6 carries 606 across ten. Moving from a lower primary class to an upper primary one doubles the planning.
If you are new to a class this term, find out before week one whether you take every subject for it or one subject across several classes. It decides how many schemes you write, and which continuous assessment records are yours to keep.
Either way, the scheme comes before the notes, because the scheme is what the notes are checked against. Pace the indicators across the teaching weeks first, then take each week from it. The procedure is in how to write a scheme of work, and the week-by-week version is in how to write a lesson note.
4. Plan from the curriculum that is in force
NaCCA completed a review of the kindergarten to Primary 6 curriculum in July 2026, and as of the middle of August it had not been adopted. Until it is, the standards-based curriculum already in force is the one to plan from, and a scheme built on it is the correct document to submit.
If the codes and the vocabulary are still unfamiliar, strands, sub-strands, content standards and indicators reads an indicator code from left to right.
5. Open the records that run all term
Three things start in week one and are only painful if you start them late.
The attendance register is marked from the first day, including for learners who have not yet been formally admitted. The Cumulative Record Card follows a learner through school, and a class with new arrivals needs those cards found or requested early rather than at the end of term, because they are supplied by GES and schools do run short of them.
Continuous assessment is the one that catches people out, because it is half the mark. On the GES upper primary report card each subject is scored out of 50 for school based assessment and out of 50 for the examination. Half of what a parent reads at the end of term comes from work you have to have been recording since week one.
The record of work is the weekly companion to all of it: the lesson note is the plan, and the record of work is what actually happened. What a record of work is covers what it contains and why it is kept separately.
If the term has already started
None of this is all or nothing. If it is week three, write the scheme from week three forward and pace the remaining indicators across the weeks that are left, rather than reconstructing weeks you have already taught. Then get one week of notes in front of your headteacher before the week begins, and you are back on the cycle.
The counting is the same every term, and it is the same again for every subject you teach. teache builds a full-year scheme from the curriculum for your class, paced across the real term lengths with every week dated, and weekly notes that carry the indicators from it. See how it works or start with one week.