Commuting between sites

Commuting / Travel
In a split-site school or college, you need to allow time for staff and/or students to move between sites, and avoid any 'instant commuting'.

Here are 4 common scenarios:

 1    In our split-site school, Break comes after period 2, and I don't want anyone to be scheduled in Upper School for period-1 and then Lower School for period-2.  How do I prevent this?
Assuming that you schedule 'top-down', so that you complete the schedule for Upper School before starting to schedule Lower School, then:
... after you have finished scheduling the Upper School, look at the Staff Timetable Screen (section F12) and double-click cells to block-off any periods that should not be used for commuting to the other building.
Eg. in the example above, if a teacher is scheduled for period-1 but is free for period-2, then block-off period 2 for that teacher so that s/he cannot be used in period-2 for the Lower School timetable.

 2   Mr Jones is a Year 7 Form Tutor and so he should register his Form/TutorGroup in Lower School at the start of the day. But he should not be expected to teach period-1 in Upper School.  How do I prevent this?
On the Staff Timetable Screen (F12) mark (block-off) the periods when you don't want Mr Jones to teach in Upper School (period-1 in this example).

Then when Upper School has been scheduled, Un-Block those periods (on the Staff Timetable Screen, F12) so that these periods can now be used, and continue with scheduling the Lower school.

 3   During scheduling, working 'interactively', I would like to be able to see whether each assignment that I make will cause the Teacher(s) to commute at an appropriate time (eg. breaks or lunches or non-teaching periods).  How can I see this?

-- a) Start by ensuring that you have entered more than one site on the School Structure Screen.

-- b) If you have, then on the ‘Visual Builder Screen’ you will see an extra tick-box: ‘Show commuting’:
-- c) Tick this and the existing lessons for each of the Teachers in the team (as shown in the bottom part of the screen) will be colour-coded by whether they are on the same site as the lesson you are about to place, or not:Green = on the same site.  
Red = on a different site (ie. there could be a commuting problem).

To exit this mode and return to the usual subject-colouring of teachers’ lessons, just un-tick ‘Show commuting’.

This feature should help you when manually dragging lessons on to the schedule, to pick good (green) periods where a teacher will not have a problem with commuting because they are already on the right site.   Pick red periods only if the teacher has time to commute [eg. across a Break or Lunch, or a non-teaching period].

 4   Having scheduled some or all of my timetable, I would like to review the commuting patterns of the Teachers.  How do I do this?

On the Staff Timetable Screen [section F12 in the Manual], click on the Style button to select 'Highlight -> Sites'.
Lessons on different Sites are shown in different colours, so you can easily see the occasions when a Teacher is moving from one Site to another.

If you decide to move a lesson, to try to improve a Teacher's commuting pattern, see FlowChart K9.

Note: If you have a situation not described above, just let us know.

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Further information:
1. Search on "multiple" (sites) in the box above.
2. Search on "senior" in the box for an article on 'Senior & Junior' schools that are linked but need commuting time for travel between them.