The Atlas Setup Decisions That Cause the Most Confusion Down the Line
From the Atlas Support Desk - The foundational setup choices that seem minor at implementation but create significant friction months or years later.
A lot of the questions we deal with are not about something going wrong - they are about schools living with the consequences of setup decisions made during implementation that seemed fine at the time. The good news is that most of these are avoidable if you know what to look out for. The less good news is that some of them are quite painful to undo after the fact.
Here are the setup decisions that generate the most downstream confusion, and how to approach them more thoughtfully.
Support desk insight: Atlas setup decisions made in year one tend to persist for years. The organisational structure you build - how you name things, how you nest programmes, how you define unit ownership - becomes very difficult to restructure once teachers have built maps inside it. Slow down at the start and get the foundations right.
Decision 1: How You Structure Your Programmes and Subjects
The way you set up programmes and subjects in Atlas determines how teachers navigate the system, how reports are generated, and how standards alignment is organised. Schools that set this up too granularly - a separate subject entry for every variant of a course - end up with a cluttered structure that is hard to navigate and produces fragmented reporting. Schools that set it up too broadly lose the ability to distinguish between courses that have meaningfully different curricula.
What to do: Before creating your Atlas structure, map your school's programme and subject hierarchy on paper first. Ask: if two courses share the same standards, outcomes, and overall curriculum design but differ only in delivery details, should they be one subject or two? As a rule of thumb, subjects should be distinct in Atlas if they have genuinely different curriculum maps - not just because they have different names in the timetable.
Decision 2: Choosing Between Shared and Individual Unit Ownership
Atlas allows units to be shared across multiple teachers or owned individually. This is one of the setup questions we are asked most often, and the answer depends heavily on your school's culture and curriculum model.
Shared units work well where teachers in the same subject are expected to deliver a consistent curriculum. They reduce duplication and make cross-teacher comparison straightforward. The risk is that one teacher's edits affect everyone's map - which can cause confusion if teachers are not communicating.
Individual units give teachers autonomy and reduce the risk of unintended changes, but create duplication across the subject and make it harder to see and maintain curriculum consistency.
What to do: Decide this at the subject level, not the school level. Some departments will benefit from shared units (IB Diploma courses with a fixed syllabus); others will work better with individual ownership (elective courses where each teacher has genuine curriculum autonomy). Document the approach for each subject and communicate it to teachers during onboarding.
Decision 3: Unit Template Fields - What to Include and What to Leave Out
Atlas's unit template is configurable - you can add custom fields to capture additional information relevant to your school. This is a genuinely useful feature, and it is also one of the most common sources of long-term pain.
Schools at implementation often add many custom fields to capture everything they might want to know about a unit. Two years later, half of those fields are blank across all units because teachers found them unnecessary or unclear. Empty fields make the map look incomplete and undermine confidence in the data.
What to do: Start with the standard Atlas unit template and add custom fields only for information that is genuinely required and that teachers can realistically provide. If you are unsure whether a field will be used, leave it out for the first year and add it later if the need becomes clear. It is much easier to add a field after the fact than to remove one that has become embedded in teacher habit - or to explain why half the maps have it empty.
Decision 4: Access Permissions for Map Editing
Who can edit units in Atlas, and who can only view them, is a setup decision with real consequences. Schools that give all teachers edit access to all subjects end up with accidental changes to other teachers' maps. Schools that lock everything down too tightly create a bottleneck where the coordinator becomes the sole editor and maps fall behind.
What to do: Set edit access at the subject level and align it with teaching assignments. A teacher should be able to edit the units in their own subjects, view units in other subjects, and not be able to modify maps they are not responsible for. Coordinator-level users should have broader edit access within their programme. Review these permissions when staff change roles or subjects.
In Summary
- Map your programme and subject hierarchy on paper before building it in Atlas - getting this structure right at the start avoids painful restructuring later.
- Decide shared versus individual unit ownership at the subject level based on curriculum model, not school-wide policy.
- Start with a lean unit template and add custom fields only when there is a clear, consistent use for them.
- Set edit permissions at the subject level and align them with teaching assignments - review annually when staff roles change.
If your Atlas setup is already causing confusion and you are not sure whether to restructure, contact the Support Desk. We can review your current setup and advise on the least disruptive path to a cleaner structure.