Teacher assignments workflow

Map teachers to class-subject pairs for the academic year: capabilities first, then assignments, the load rules that reject a save, and what breaks downstream.

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Last updated August 29, 2026

A teacher assignment is one row joining a teacher, a subject, a class, and an academic year, with a target number of periods per week and optional minimum and maximum bounds. It is the record the timetable generator schedules from, the record that decides which class timetables and gradebooks a teacher can open, and the record that has to be cleared before that member of staff can be deactivated. Get it wrong and the symptom usually appears somewhere else entirely.

Prerequisites

An active academic year at /academic-year. Assignments are stored per year and are not inherited.
Classes and subjects created at /classes and /subjects.
Each teacher existing as a staff account with a staffType — PRT, TGT, or PGT — set on the employment record at /school-staff. The staffType drives both the weekly teaching cap and primary-school specialist rules.
Periods defined in the timetable workspace, because the class capacity check multiplies periods per day by instructional days per week.

Who owns it

Creating, editing, and deleting assignments is limited to Platform Admin, Principal, Vice Principal, and the office Admin role; anyone else gets a 403 that names those four. Teachers are not locked out of the data — they can read their own assignments, and only their own. Asking the API for another teacher’s rows returns a refusal rather than an empty list.

Setup sequence

Open /timetable and go to Configure → Assign teachers (the /teachers/assignments link redirects here).
Record which subjects each teacher can teach this year. Class assignment is refused until that capability exists.
Map each class-subject pair to a teacher and set periods per week, plus a minimum and maximum where the load should flex.
Set the homeroom separately at /classes using the Class teacher and Co-class teacher fields.
Review Configure → Staffing for overloaded teachers and under-filled classes before generating.
Generate the grid, resolve conflicts, and publish.

Why a save is rejected

Error	Rule	What to change
Assignment already exists	Teacher, subject, class, and year are unique together	Edit the existing row rather than adding a second one.
Missing subject capability	The teacher has no active capability for that subject and year	Add the subject to the teacher in the same Assign teachers step first.
Class would be overfilled	Total periods for the class exceed periods per day times instructional days per week	Reduce periods on this or another subject, or add periods to the day.
Teacher above the weekly cap	Projected periods exceed the cap computed from staffType and the timetable constraints	Move a class to another teacher or raise the cap under Configure → Constraints. Capacity counts the maximum, not the target, so a wide max eats headroom.
Primary specialist required	PE, Music, Art, and Dance in grades 1-5 need the matching specialist staffType	Assign a specialist; a PRT cannot take these subjects in primary classes.
Invalid weekly bounds	Minimum, target, and maximum must be ordered, and PE has its own range	Correct the three numbers so minimum is not above target and target is not above maximum.

What these rows feed

Consumer	What crosses the boundary
Timetable generation	Each active assignment becomes periods the solver has to place for that class and teacher.
Class timetable access	A teacher can read a class grid when they hold an active assignment to that class in the active year, or are its class or co-class teacher.
Homeroom eligibility	An active assignment to a class qualifies a teacher to be set as its class teacher even when their staffType would not.
Gradebook scope	Mark entry is scoped to the class-subject pairs the teacher is assigned to.
Substitute cover	Approved leave generates cover from the published timetable entries the assignments produced — not from the assignments themselves.

Common questions

Quick answers in plain language.

Where is the teacher assignments editor now?+

Inside the timetable workspace, under Configure → Assign teachers. The old /teachers/assignments and /teachers/config addresses still work as redirects — the first lands on the assignments step, the second on the staffing review — so existing bookmarks and links keep working.

Why does saving an assignment say to assign the subject to the teacher first?+

An active subject capability for that teacher, subject, and academic year is required before class assignments are allowed. Capabilities are the first half of the same Assign teachers step; add the subject to the teacher there, then map the classes.

Does assigning a teacher to a class make them the class teacher?+

No. Homeroom is a separate field on the class record, set at /classes, and it is what controls the attendance register. A subject assignment does make the teacher eligible to be chosen as homeroom teacher for that class, which is often why the two get confused.

Can I copy last year’s assignments instead of rebuilding them?+

Yes. The assignments step can copy an entire year of teacher assignments into another year, and there is a bulk import that takes employee id, class name, subject code, and periods per week with a dry-run pass so you can see the errors before writing anything.

How do teacher subject and class assignments affect the app?+

Assignments for the active year control which subjects a teacher can enter grades for, which timetable slots they see, and which exam marking tasks reach them. Manage them in the timetable workspace under Configure - /teachers/assignments redirects there. Attendance is the exception: the register follows classTeacherId and coClassTeacherId on the class record, edited at /classes, so adding a subject assignment never grants attendance access.