Staff timetables

Teacher timetable generator

A timetable can be perfectly valid and quietly unfair. Staff notice the unfairness in September, and live with it until July.

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There is a conversation that happens in every staff room in September. Two teachers compare timetables. One has five consecutive periods on Tuesday and every Friday afternoon; the other has a comfortable spread and Friday free. Both timetables are entirely valid — no clashes, everything adds up — and one of those teachers is going to spend the year resentful.

That outcome is almost never a decision anyone made. It is what fell out of the order lessons happened to be placed in, and it is locked in for a year.

Total load is the least informative number

Contact periods against contracted hours is the measure schools track, and it is the easiest to get roughly right. It is also close to useless on its own: two teachers with identical period counts can have completely different working weeks.

Distribution decides whether the week is survivable

Five consecutive periods is not the same job as five periods spread across a day with breaks between them, even though the number is identical. Teaching is a performance, and performing for five straight hours degrades by the fourth in a way that shows up in the classroom.

A good generator treats consecutive-period limits as a real constraint rather than a preference to satisfy if convenient.

Gap quality matters more than gap count

A teacher with three free periods scattered as single gaps has, in practice, almost no usable time — one period is enough to answer email and not enough to plan, mark, or meet a parent. The same three periods as one contiguous block is a genuinely useful afternoon.

Two timetables can show identical free-period totals and offer completely different working lives. Minimising fragmentation is where automated scheduling earns its keep.

Somebody has to take the unwanted slots

Early starts, last period on Friday, the difficult groups, the rooms on the far side of campus. Fairness is not that nobody does these — it is that the same person does not do all of them, every week, all year, because the grid happened to work out that way.

Why building by hand produces this

Fairness is a global property and manual timetabling is a local process. When you place a lesson you are solving the immediate problem: this class needs Maths, this teacher is free, this room is empty. You are not simultaneously evaluating what that placement does to the fifth-period distribution of forty staff across a week. Nobody can hold that.

So the fairness of the finished timetable is essentially an accident. A solver, by contrast, will evaluate a large number of valid arrangements against workload criteria and pick a balanced one, because it does not get bored.

Decide these before you build

A maximum on consecutive teaching periods
A minimum block of contiguous non-contact time per week
A rota for early starts and last-period Friday
How part-time contracts and protected time are represented
Who gets flexibility this year, and why — then publish the criteria

Frequently asked questions

Can the demo on this site produce teacher timetables?

It has a teacher view — switch the grid from "By class" to "By teacher" and you will see each teacher’s week. It is limited to three teachers, because it is a demonstration of the engine rather than a tool for scheduling staff.

Why publish the fairness criteria alongside the timetable?

Because most staff resentment is not about having a hard week — it is about believing the hard week was arbitrary. A stated rule that produced an uncomfortable result is a very different conversation from an unexplained grid.

Can software decide who gets the difficult group?

No, and it should not try. A teacher returning from illness, one carrying a heavy pastoral load, one in their first year — these are contextual factors no engine can see. The right shape is that software produces a balanced baseline and a human adjusts it for circumstances.

How do part-time contracts fit in?

As hard constraints, not hints. A teacher who does not work Fridays should have no Friday slots available to the scheduler at all, rather than a note that someone is expected to remember.

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