Unstaffed Activities
Your final timetable will, of course, need to be fully staffed.
However, during testing / while seeing whether your timetable will schedule, you may wish to leave some or all of your activities unstaffed, and see what happens. If you do this, TimeTabler will choose a teacher for you (Example: for a French lesson, TimeTabler will choose a teacher whose 'Main Subject' is French ... next best is a teacher whose 2nd subject is French ... and finally, any free teacher will be chosen!).
So you can schedule with:
- all your activities staffed (the best way)
- all your activities unstaffed (can be good for trials)
- a combination of the two.
- Note: with each of these methods, you can also use 'Teacher Pools'.
What are the dangers of scheduling with many unstaffed activities ?
The issue is usually with Quality - ie: the timetable will work, but its Quality is not as high as it should be (for staff and/or students).
Examples: not getting the best teacher for a particular group (eg: bottom-set Maths) ... getting split-teaching in years where you didn't want it ... not affording the English department the power to choose their own staffing ... etc.
You can ask your Department-Heads to now review the created timetable and choose their own staffing, but they are now restricted by the timetable ... it would have been better to ask them for their ideal staffing pre-scheduling, run the various pre-scheduling checks (for example: Combing Chart, Staff Deployment Analysis, Conflict Matrix, Staff Loading, Zarraga’s Rule, etc.) in TimeTabler, and work from there by seeing where the problems lie / best way forward. [You also have to be aware of teachers who are in more than one Department].
What are the advantages of scheduling with unstaffed activities ?
It can be a good as a pre-timetabling check, as a 'proof of concept'.
To see a good way to do this, download the 4-page PDF from here.
Summary of staffing choices:
In terms of choosing which teachers take particular lessons, you can choose the staff you require for each Activity, on the Curriculum Diagram. To help you with this, TimeTabler creates “Proforma Excel spreadsheets” for the Heads-of-subject or Department-Heads to complete.
You can also use “Teacher Pools” (where, for example, you put all your PE teachers in a “PE Pool” and then say that for this Activity, you want any 2 free teachers from the Pool).
You can also leave an Activity un-staffed and ask TimeTabler to choose the Teachers for you (from those available in that period) – but schools would only tend to use this for testing whether their curriculum can be scheduled, not for the final (high quality) timetable.
See also the Manual and Help-movies on these topics.
Related articles:
- Alternative Curriculum
- Staffing Proformas
- Auto-staffing
By the TimeTabler Team