Setup

Periods & the timetable

First the shape of the school day, then a class's week. Both are on the same screen, because the periods you define are the rows every timetable is built on.

Watch

4 minutes 6 seconds.

0:14 One page, two halves
0:21 The bell schedule
0:29 Naming a period
0:37 Order
0:47 Breaks
0:55 Afternoon starts
1:09 A period is school-wide
1:21 Choosing the class
1:34 The class's subjects
1:41 Placing a period
1:55 Hatched cells
2:13 Checked before you drop
2:26 Changing or removing one
2:51 Undo
3:02 Copying a day
3:21 Reading the page
3:40 A subject with no teacher

The two halves

Every day → Timetable holds two things that are easy to confuse, because one is the scaffolding for the other.

Panel	What it is	Scope
Bell schedule	The periods and breaks of the school day, in order.	The whole school
The week	Which subject sits in each of those periods, Monday to Saturday.	One class-section

The simple rule

The bell schedule gives you the rows. The week fills the cells. Every class in the school shares the same rows.

The bell schedule

A period is a named slice of the day. Add one from the form under the list on the right.

Field	What it does
Name	What everyone calls it — Period 1, Lunch Break, Assembly. It is the row label in every timetable.
Start / End	The clock times shown under the name, and what a student or parent reads off their timetable.
Order	Where it sits in the day. This, not the clock, decides the running order — so Period 1 stays above Period 2 whatever times you type.
Break	Turns the row into lunch or an interval. A break spans the whole week as one band and nothing can be placed in it.
First period of the afternoon	Marks where the afternoon begins. See below.

Each row in the list has a pencil to edit it and a bin to delete it. Both act on the period itself, not on one class.

A period belongs to every class

Editing a period changes it for the whole school at once. Deleting one removes whatever is scheduled in it, in every class — the confirmation says so before you agree, and this one is not undoable.

Before term starts this costs nothing. Half way through a term, a deleted period takes real timetables with it.

Afternoon starts

This is the one tick people skip, and it only matters if your school takes attendance twice a day. Tick it on the first teaching period after lunch.

The period carries an afternoon starts badge afterwards, and the teacher who takes that period is the one allowed to fill in the afternoon register. Only one period can hold it; when you set it somewhere else the edit box tells you where it is now.

If your school registers once a day, leave it clear on every period.

Building the week

Pick the Class and then the Section. The week below is that one section's.
The subjects of that section are down the right, each chip carrying the teacher who takes it.
Click a chip to pick it up, then click any free period. Or drag the chip onto the week — whichever you prefer.
Press Esc, or Cancel in the blue bar, to put a chip down without placing it.

Periods run down the side, days across the top, so the whole week is in front of you. Each placement saves on its own as you make it; there is no save button to forget.

Nothing to place?

An empty subjects panel means that section has no subjects assigned yet. Set them under Subjects first — a timetable period is a subject in a slot, and the subject is what brings its teacher.

The clash guard

The moment you pick up a subject, the week redraws. Cells that go hatched are cells that subject cannot go in, for one of three reasons:

its teacher is already teaching another class in that period
its teacher has reached their limit for that day
its teacher has reached their limit for the week

Click a hatched cell and it tells you which of the three it is, naming the class that has the teacher — so you know who to go and ask, rather than guessing.

Checked before the drop, not after

This is the point of the screen. A clash is refused as you place it, so a teacher can never end up in two rooms at the same time and be found out later by someone reading a printed timetable.

The per-day and per-week limits come from the teacher's own record under Teachers & staff: max periods per day, multiplied by their working days for the week. Raise them there if the limit is wrong, not by working around it here.

A subject with no teacher

If any subject of the section has no teacher against it, the builder says so. Those periods can still be placed, but nothing can be checked for them — an unassigned subject cannot clash, because there is nobody to clash. Assign the teacher under Subjects.

Changing what is placed

Hover a period that is already in the week and two small buttons appear.

The pencil changes that one period only — a cover teacher for a single lesson, or a different room. The rest of the week is untouched.
The bin asks first, naming the subject, its teacher, the day and the period, so you cannot take out the wrong one by reflex.

After anything you do here — a placement, a removal, a copy, a clear — a blue Undo bar appears. Nothing on this screen is final, so it is safe to try an arrangement and take it back.

Copying and clearing

Each day column has two small controls in its header.

copy… takes another day and copies it over this one. Two days that look alike get built once.
The eraser clears that day.

Clear week at the top does the whole section, Monday to Saturday, and gives those periods back to their teachers.

All three say what they will do to how many periods before doing it — a copy into a day that already has periods tells you how many will be replaced — and all three leave anUndo behind.

Reading the page

What you see	What it means
12 of 48 teaching slots filled	How much of this section's week is done. Breaks are not counted, so a full week really is the number on the right.
The number on a day heading	How many periods that day has.
The number on a subject chip	How many periods of that subject are placed this week.
28 left on a chip	How much room that teacher has in their week before they hit their limit.
full on a chip	That teacher has no room left. Every remaining cell for them is hatched.

Where this sits

Three screens, in this order:

1Academic setup — the year, its classes and sections.
2Subjects — what each section is taught, and by whom.
3Timetable — place those subjects into the week.

Once the week is built, teachers, students and parents all read the same timetable from it, and the attendance register follows the periods you set here.

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