Part-timers Interaction Report

Purpose of the Report:
To show you how your part-timers interact with each other, so you can spot any difficult combinations / interactions before you start scheduling.

Where to find it:
This useful Report is reached in TimeTabler via the route: Check & Validate -> Part-timers -> Interaction Report.

Content of the Report:
The Report gives you important information about how your Part-time staff interact when they appear together in teams (eg. for Maths sets, or for Options blocks):
It lists all your Activities which contain at least one Part-timer, with the following key information:

PT = number of Part-timers in this Activity
Free = number of periods where ALL staff in the team are free
Req = number of periods this activity requires
Flex** = Flexibility: 'Free minus Req' as a percentage of the week/cycle (X = not possible)
A colon (:) before a teacher's name means s/he is a Part-timer.

The Report also shows a time-line for each activity, with an X showing the impossible periods.

To see how each teacher's Unavailability contributes to this overall Unavailability, you can right-click on the relevant Block on the Curriculum Diagram Screen.
This helps you to see which Part-timers are causing the difficulty in any period ...so you may decide to remove or replace a specific Part-timer in a problem Block.

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**Notes about 'Flex'
The formula for 'Flex'ibility is:
(Total periods in cycle minus unavailable periods minus periods required by this activity) all divided by (Total periods in cycle), as a percentage.

Example: if you have 50 periods in the week/cycle, 5 of which are unavailable to this activity (because of the part-time staff involved), and the activity requires 4 singles (SSSS), then we say the ‘Flexibility’ you have for this activity is:
(50-5-4)/50 = 82%

It gives you an idea / feeling as to which the more-affected / problematic activities are likely to be.

Taking an extreme case: If you only had 4 periods where all the part-timers were free, and you needed 4 periods (DSS, say) – then your flexibility would be 0%.  If the flexibility goes below 0% (ie. it’s not possible to place all the lessons of this activity) then it says “X” instead of a percentage figure.