For principals and assistant principals of Australian primary schools
Less time fixing timetables. More time running your school.
Bell Path is school timetabling software for Australian primary schools. It plans part-timers, planning time, meetings, daily cover, yard duty and wet days in one place. Setup takes about 30 minutes, and when the week changes Bell Path rebuilds the timetable in minutes.
On a spreadsheet, one staff change in March means rebuilding the week by hand.
Already have a timetable? Bring it in and run Daily Cover on it. It is free for two weeks on your own timetable. You pay when you share it with staff or keep going past that.
Teacher view
Mrs Bennett · 3B · Term 2 · Week 4
Filling the grid is the easy part.
The hard part is keeping every part-timer's days, every specialist rotation, every meeting and every planning-time entitlement correct at the same time. Move one, and the rest move with it.
- To set up a primary school
- ~30 min
- To generate a small school’s timetable
- ~2 min
- Classroom teachers released for planning in the sample week
- 22
- Planning sessions placed in the sample week
- 84
Answer it yourself, free
Three free tools you can use right now.
They need no account and send nothing anywhere. They run in your browser and work whether or not you ever use Bell Path.
In her own words
An assistant principal set up her school in Bell Path. This is what she said.
Suzy Evans
Assistant Principal · Diamond Creek East Primary School
Bell Path is going to save me an incredible amount of time. After entering all our timetable requirements, I was impressed by how easy it was to review individual teachers, classes, and programs to ensure fairness and equity across the timetable.
What I'm most excited about is seeing Bell Path work its magic each school morning. Instead of spending time checking daily absences and working out who and what needs to be covered, Bell Path will do it all for me, freeing me up to focus on the things that matter most.
“I have never been to a school and been given a rundown I could read myself and understand clearly. This is the first one that made me feel held.”
A relief teacher, after her first Bell Path day sheet.
Founding-school price
Founding schools pay $1,000 for the year.
The first five schools are pilot schools and pay nothing in their first year. The next fifteen are founding schools and pay $1,000 for the year. There is no setup fee, and you pay after your school is set up.
Founding schools 6 to 20
Prices in AUD. No GST is currently added.
Pilot schools 1 to 5 get their first 12 months free, then pay $1,000 a year for two years before standard pricing applies. After the first 20 schools, standard pricing depends on school size and runs from $679 to $12,599 a year.
Before you sign up
You are probably thinking one of these.
These are the three doubts principals raise most often, with an honest answer under each one.
“Our school is too unusual for this to work.”
Job-share pairs, specialists who also teach a class, time in lieu and rules that differ by year level are all handled today. You also cannot pay for a setup that cannot generate, so if your school does not fit, you find out before any money changes hands.
“We already use Compass. I'm not replacing everything.”
You are not meant to. Bell Path sits beside Compass, CASES21 and eduPay and sticks to its own job: the timetable, planning time, daily cover and yard duty. The timetable does not even need student names.
“I don't have time to set up something new right now.”
Setup takes about thirty minutes, once. You are writing down what you already carry in your head: who works which days, which agreements are real and which meetings cannot move. Bell Path keeps it for every timetable after that.
School approval
Built to be easier for a principal to approve.
Bell Path does a narrow job, keeps student data out wherever it can, and gives you a printed pack to review before any real school data goes in.
Bell Path · school approval pack
For the principal’s desk
It sits beside your admin system.
Bell Path plans the timetable, planning time, daily cover and yard duty. It does not replace Compass, CASES21, eduPay, email or your learning platforms.
The approval pack can be printed.
It lists the data Bell Path holds, the companies that process it, how public links are limited, where to get support and the risks the school should weigh up.
It keeps student data to a minimum.
The timetable does not need student names at all. Where Education Support records name a student, an initials-only setting limits what appears on screen and in print.
Where Bell Path stops
Four things it will not do for you.
Every tool has limits. These are ours, written down here so you do not find them on your own in week three.
It will not replace your admin system.
Bell Path sits beside Compass, CASES21, eduPay and your learning platforms. If you were hoping to retire one of those, this is not the tool for that job.
It is built for primary schools.
Secondary timetabling is a different problem with different staffing and subject lines. We have not solved it, and we do not claim to.
It cannot guess your unwritten agreements.
Someone who knows how the school really runs has to sit down for about half an hour and enter them. No import can do that part for you.
It will not quietly publish a broken timetable.
If what you have asked for cannot be scheduled, Bell Path stops and tells you why, instead of handing back something that looks finished and is not. That does mean some schools need to relax a rule before a timetable will generate.
Your first setup
Set it up once. Bell Path remembers your primary school.
Once your staff, classes, rooms, meetings and unwritten agreements are in, Bell Path keeps them. Later changes are small edits, not a fresh rebuild.
- One setup ~30 min
Teach Bell Path how your primary school works.
Add your classroom teachers, specialist teachers, classes, rooms, meetings and the unwritten agreements that make the week work. Bell Path keeps all of it for every timetable after this.
Staff23 of 23Bennett Class 3B Mon–Fri Chen LOTE Tue · Thu Patel Music Wed · Fri + Add staff - Same day ~1 hour
Generate, review and publish.
A small school generates in about two minutes, and larger schools take longer. You then check the teacher, class and room views, and Bell Path shows any clashes before you publish.
Generate · Term 2 v3Complete · 1m 48s0clashes- Staff
- 23
- Classes
- 18
- Meetings
- 9
Review & publish - Later Minutes
Change one detail, not the whole timetable.
When a staff member, room, meeting or rule changes, Bell Path regenerates from what it already knows about your school.
Change · staffv3 → v4Patel moved to Thursdays
Affected: 8 sessions · 4 classes
Regenerated · 28sRepublish
Easier first setup
Let your office staff enter the lists.
A principal should not spend the first hour retyping lists that already exist. Someone else can enter the staff and class lists, and the decisions only you can make wait for you.
How the handoff works
- 1
You send one secure link
After you sign up, you invite the person at your school who already knows how to export staff and class lists.
- 2
They enter the lists
They paste your classes and staff from Compass, Sentral, Xuno, CASES21 or another export into a guided workbook.
- 3
You make the school decisions
Bell Path emails you when the lists are in. Which teacher owns which class, the specialist rules and the other judgement calls are left flagged for you to decide.
The handoff link is offered at the start of setup, once you have signed up.
What Bell Path does
Eight tools, one staff list.
You enter your staff, classes, rooms and school agreements once. Every tool below works from that same list, so a change in one place is already known everywhere else.
Planning stories
Three situations most primary schools will recognise.
These stories show common planning situations without naming a school. Suzy’s feedback above is from a real school.
- Three job-share pairs and one specialist who also taught a class.The assistant principal was holding the job-share and specialist arrangements in spreadsheets and her own memory. She entered them into Bell Path once, then reviewed one timetable instead of four drafts.
- A timetable the assistant principal could defend before term started.Every time one detail changed, the whole draft needed another night of checking. She entered the real rules into Bell Path once, then reviewed the result instead of rebuilding it.
- Daily cover, yard duty and wet days kept in the one place.Once the timetable was shared with staff, the school still jumped between tools every absence morning. Keeping cover, yard duty and wet day plans in Bell Path meant the week’s picture was already there.
Ready when you are
Publish a timetable you can trust.
Bell Path builds the timetable from the details you give it, checks it before staff see it, and keeps working through the term for cover and duty rosters.
