How to Prepare your School’s Timetables

Preparing school timetables must be followed by a well-thought process of prioritising the children’s academic performance and the talents, skills and working time of the teachers. It navigates around the two most important stakeholders of your educational institution- teachers and students. This is why today in our Tigernix Blog Article series, we are going to guide you through the how and whys behind preparing the most competent schedules for your school.

Why is preparing competent school timetables crucial for schools?

Even though not addressed often by many, preparing school timetables have been a perennial problem due to many limitations in grasping the right information. Preparing school timetables are deemed to be crucial by educational administrators for many reasons. Firstly, the allocation of school timetables according to the availability of a teacher’s time is essential. Imagine if a school centre operates without a schedule. Teachers would be frustrated with back-to-back classes or might even have to conduct two courses at the same time! But competent school timetables will be comforting to both teachers and students. It would naturalise and rhyme in the minds of the children, allow them to be prepared for their classes, and the teachers would not be overloaded with cramping work shifts from one class to another.

However, two main considerations must be fully-apprehended by a school when preparing school timetables, they are:

  • The school must be able to create the least clashing school schedules, especially if there are alternate choices for the students when choosing their preferred course to attend
  • All timetable slots must be equally utilised with all the tutor talents, classroom amenities, centre time and facilities so that the need for extra classes is no more an option

What are the problems faced by schools when preparing school timetables?

The input instances when preparing timetables are realistically large; many variables must be considered when designing a school timetable; like,

  • The Interests of The Students,
  • The Availability of The Teachers
  • The Availability of the Teaching Requirements
  • The Availability of Classrooms and Adequate Space Per Classes
  • The Selective Courses Offered
  • Holidays
  • Considering the School Calendar Events
  • Optimal Allocation of Time Slots and More

This makes manually preparing school timetables very challenging and time-consuming. But another challenge is that there is no heuristic method to solve the scheduling complications of a school. The needs and practices of all schools are different from each other- this problem implies that scheduling tools of schools must be customised to fit their operations.

Another issue is allocating resources into each schedule without overlapping or recurring of time slot allocations due to human errors. This is another main dispute aroused when planning school timetables. The more complicated scheduling or timetabling is- they are most of the time very puzzling- the more attention a person will typically have to invest on preparing schedules. Preparing schedules can be very time-consuming (maybe weeks) – since the time table preparer has to formulate, test, revise and edit the schedules all the time.

When teachers are being assigned with several classes -maybe even from two separate departments of faculties-the preparation of time tables get even more complicated-. The teacher would be crammed with back to class, and the waiting time of the students will be misspent when the teacher arrives and gets ready for the lessons. Part-time teachers would also be competently facilitated, as there time slots are different, an equal amount of assertiveness must be invested when preparing their time tables too.

With the advents of new courses and teachers with different talents, the coherencies of the current time tables will be affected directly. Which means a coherent timetable od a particular year would be disrupted with time; therefore, the time tables must be occasionally reviewed by the administrators to check whether the teacher-student interactions are streamlining in the classes.

Unique events like inevitable ‘split classes’, ‘flipped classrooms’, ‘off-timetable lessons’, sports events, exhibitions, workshops and other events in the school calendar or especially suggested by teachers must also be unchallengingly incorporated in the school timetables. These are a few of the main problems that school administrations will face when preparing school timetables.

How to overcome these problems?

When considering the overplus of disputes faced in the preparation of timetables, one fact is made clear: education institutions need an intelligent automated scheduling tool. Since multiple attributes must be analysed simultaneously and real-time data retrievals must be acknowledged when planning school timetables, a sophisticated technological solution is required. Timetable Management Software is that noteworthy tool! It can be integrated into the School management Systems, can be employed by schools to overcome this challenge.

A Timetable Management Module allows the managers and schedulers of education centres to form school timetables using online scheduling tools effortlessly. A competent Timetable or Classroom Management Tool is a user-friendly platform that allows the teachers to take the liberty of planning or rescheduling. It also inherits the capability of using the auto-planning mode, where an automated timetable generator will be updated when any variation or a new course or teacher is entered into the system or when a student enters his/her or preferred subject selections. In addition, the Timetable management Software can work collaboratively with the other modules of the School Management System to find the most competent timetables, unlike the time-consuming, paper-depended manual timetable preparation methods.

Schools can update their Timetable Management Systems since they are customisable to suit their signature requirements. Therefore, this solution is suitable for any education centre and is a flexible and intuitive tool to supercharge classroom activities throughout the school. Even the teachers can use this software to set reminders or use interactive scheduling tools to prioritise and plan their school activities without any trouble.

What can a school gain from proper scheduling?

Suppose a school has fostered profession timetabling software to their central School Management System. In that case, they can unlock a wave of advantageous and ensure that their school is a smooth knowledge delivering education body. Here are some of the not-to-be-overlooked advantages that your school can gain by using Timetable Management Software to your institutions.

  • End-to-end configuration of all your classroom settings, resources, amenities and all details required to assign a classroom to a teacher and his or her students. The school will have comprehensive profiles of their classrooms, allowing them to use their spaces optimally.

  • Classroom booking by the teacher or by the administration as per the courses and periods will be made more manageable, and classes will never be overlapping again.

  • Calendars and schedules can be accessed by students or teachers (with permitted accessing protocols) to find their classrooms easily and attend on time; because the school timetables will be distributed digitally in the system. Teachers and administrators can also trace the school operations and check for teacher performances concerning their schedules. This way, the teachers can be assigned for the right classes at the right time to benefit them and their students mutually.

  • The school will be delivered with the general convenience of saving time and securing school data by eliminating paper-oriented manual scheduling methods and errors. Since the timetable management system is error-free, intelligent, responsive and automated to prepare schedules when deviations are required proactively; it is merely the best scheduler for school classrooms.

Understanding the efficacies that could be granted by Timetable Management Software is therefore vital for education system administrators to promote their curriculums to be streamlining in their working hours. This way, the students, teachers and parents would trust the school’s programs to be well-organised and mutually beneficial for the education delivering process.