School timetables

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See also: Timetables

A school timetable is a table for coordinating these four elements:

  • students
  • teachers
  • rooms
  • times ("periods")

School timetables usually cycle every week or every fortnight. The phrase "School timetables" largely refers to high schools, because primary schools typically have trivially simple structures.

High school timetables are quite different from university timetables. The main difference is the fact that in high schools, students have to be occupied and supervised every hour of the school day, or nearly every hour. Also, high school teachers generally have much higher teaching loads than is the case in universities. As a result, it is generally considered that university timetables involve more human judgement whereas high school timetabling is a more computationally intensive task, perhaps like solving a Rubik's cube.

Contents

[edit] Terminology

The following terms have a special meaning in the context of high school timetables, which may differ from their meanings in other contexts:

  • Class: A set of students who regularly meet the same teacher to study a particular subject. For example, the 8A Maths class.
  • Course: A particular subject studied at a particular level, for example Year 8 Maths.
  • Period: A time interval within the teaching cycle within which a lesson can be scheduled, and which is the smallest such time interval. For example, "Monday third period".
  • Block: A set of classes which are linked vertically, in other words they are always scheduled on the same periods.
  • Student body: A set of students who are timetabled together, for example the 8A roll-call group.
  • Band (or Cluster): A set of classes involving the same student body, which are therefore horizontally linked, meaning they must be on separate periods
  • Year group: A set of students at the same stage of their schooling, for example Year 6.
  • Elective Line: A block of many classes of many subjects such that each student may choose one subject from the line.

[edit] Construction of High School Timetables

High school timetables can be constructed fully manually or fully automatically or somewhere in between, but most commonly computers are used at some point in the process.

[edit] Problems and Issues Involved

The task of constructing a high school timetable involves the following issues (not an exhaustive list):

  • Assigning periods to classes. There is a need to spread out lessons across the teaching cycle as much as possible, e.g. to avoid having 3 lessons on the same day or most of the lessons in Week A of a 2-week cycle.
  • Some classes need 'double periods' (2 consecutive periods). This especially happens with practical lessons such as science lab work or art classes where it takes a long time to set up equipment.
  • Assigning teachers to classes ('staffing'): sometimes the department head teachers stipulate what the staffing will be, but often there are alternative teachers that can be given to a class, and the timetabler must make the decision based on timetabling considerations.
  • Assigning rooms to classes. Some subjects require specialist rooms, e.g. science labs.
  • The last period of a day is often less desired and these must be shared fairly across all classes
  • Some schools assign the same number of periods to all subjects, but more commonly (at least outside USA) there are a variety of lengths of classes: 9 periods per cycle, 8, 7, 5 and so on. If this is the case, it means that it's not possible to have a 'coherent' structure to the timetable. 'Coherent' means that the classes in each year up neatly with classes in other years in school-wide 'super-columns'. Non coherent timetables are much more difficult to construct.
  • Occasionally there is 'vertical integration': a class from one year has a requirement to line up with a particular class from the next year. This happens mainly when students are allowed to take subjects in a higher year level.
  • Individual teachers have 'unavailabilities': periods when they are occupied in external or non-teaching tasks and therefore cannot teach on those periods.
  • Part-timer teachers need to have certain entire days off. They will either specify to the school which weekdays they are or simply how many days per cycle they need off. Such teachers can greatly add to the difficulty of timetabling when they are assigned to large blocks.
  • Sometimes two schools try to coordinate their timetables in order to be able to share a small number of staff. Often the schools have different bell times. Often also there is travel time between campuses which must be taken into consideration.
  • Sometimes a school is spread over 2 or more campuses, and the timetable should minimise the amount of cross-campus travel for students and teachers. Furthermore, where travel occurs, the travel time must be taken into consideration.
  • Sometimes there are constraints imposed from external organisations, such as sports venues bookings or technical education for senior students.
  • Sometimes there are 2 or 3 subjects which rotate between student bodies throughout the year. For example, the 8A students might take Art in the first half of the year and Music in the second half.
  • Classes should be assigned rooms in a way which attempts to give the same room to the same class for all or most lessons ('room constancy').
  • Sometimes it is unavoidable to have what is known as a 'split class': this is a class where one teacher takes it for some lessons and another teacher for other lessons. This can happen e.g. because no single teacher is available on all scheduled periods, or because no single teacher can take it without going over their maximum teaching load. Split classes are highly undesirable, especially in private (well funded) schools.
  • Off-timetable lessons: sometimes an occasional lesson is scheduled "off the timetable" meaning before school or after school or during lunch. This usually happens with older students. It can be a desperate response to intractible timetabling problems or a compromise reached in order for the school to be able to offer less popular subjects.



[edit] External links

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