Timetable

The weekly grid: periods, curriculum load, generation, conflict resolution, the publish gate that makes a grid visible, and substitute cover.

Teaching & schedule guide for day and boarding schools.

Last updated August 29, 2026

Building the grid is the second job of a new academic year, done after the curriculum and before teaching starts. It all happens inside one workspace at /timetable: Configure holds the five setup steps, Generate runs the solver, Fix issues clears what could not be placed, and Tools and Analytics take over once a grid exists. The legacy /teachers/assignments route has no page of its own and redirects here.

The generator does not invent a working week. With holidays respected, which is the default, the weekly grid days come from the academic calendar and the weekend configuration for that year, so a five-day school gets a five-column grid without saying so. Without a calendar it falls back to Monday to Saturday, and generation aborts if the working-day list ends up empty. Configure the year at /academic-calendar first.

Prerequisites

An active academic year with calendar days and the weekend pattern set at /academic-calendar.
Period definitions - bell times and periods per day - on the Define periods step.
Curriculum load at /timetable/curriculum, which sets the weekly period target per class-subject.
Active teacher assignments for that year, edited on the Assign teachers step.

Who sees which tab

Tab	Who
View - the grid by class, teacher or school	Any signed-in user
Configure, Generate, Fix issues, Analytics	Platform Admin, Principal, Vice Principal, Admin
Tools - hand edits, substitutes, Excel, versions	Those four roles plus Teacher
My substitutes	Teacher, plus those four roles

What breaks if you skip a step

No curriculum load: the solver has no period target and leaves subjects unplaced.
Calendar not generated: the grid falls back to six days and Saturday rules go unenforced.
Never published: learners see nothing, and period attendance cannot be marked at all.

Handoff and limits

The published grid is what leave, period attendance and laboratory bookings read. Approving staff leave with a named substitute writes cover rows against each published slot the absent teacher holds, and coverage gaps show in Analytics. Lab sessions are booked from a period into /laboratories. Nothing here writes marks or attendance. Room capacity is stored as total desks but never enforced, read access to another class grid is scoped to the academic year, and there is no scheduled publish.

Common questions

Quick answers in plain language.

Why does ?tab=configure open the View tab for a teacher?+

The tab policy is resolved on the server, not in the browser. Configure, Generate, Fix issues and Analytics need one of Platform Admin, Principal, Vice Principal or Admin; anything else silently resolves to View. Teachers do get Tools and My substitutes. Deep links and saved intents cannot widen this.

Publish keeps failing with a conflict count. What do I do?+

Open Fix issues and clear every clash the report lists - teacher double-bookings and room overlaps are the usual causes. The conflict check runs school-wide, or filtered to the class when you publish a single class. It has no override. The separate block about an unresolved generation worklist does have one, so read the error text to see which of the two you hit.

Does the generator know about holidays?+

It knows about the shape of the week, not individual dates. With holidays respected it reads the configured weekly grid days for the academic year, including nth-Saturday rules, and places subjects only on those days. It does not skip a specific festival date - the calendar handles day-level absence, and leave plus substitutes handle the day itself.

Who is notified when we republish after a small edit?+

Only the people affected. Publish captures a snapshot of the resulting grid and diffs it against the previous published snapshot, then notifies the teachers and classes whose slots changed. A republish that moves nothing notifies nobody, which is why re-publishing an unchanged grid is safe.