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Australian buyer guide · 2026

Timetabling software in Australia, chosen by what your week actually contains.

Most "best timetabling software in Australia" pages are written by one of the vendors on the list. So is this one. The difference is that this page tells you which of the others to pick, and names the two things Bell Path does not currently do.

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A search for the best timetabling software in Australia returns a small number of pages, and almost all of them were written by a vendor. One of the two currently ranking highest is published by a company with fifty other pages just like it, one per country, and its Australian page gives GDPR compliance as a reason to buy. GDPR is European law. It has no application to an Australian government school. That single line tells you the page was assembled without anybody who has run an Australian school week reading it.

This page is also written by a vendor. Bell Path is on the list. What we can offer instead of false neutrality is precision: an accurate description of who each option is actually built for, the questions worth asking any of them, and an honest account of the two things Bell Path does not currently do that a competitor does.

The first split matters more than any feature comparison, so start there.

Primary and secondary are different problems

Secondary timetabling is dominated by student subject selection. Hundreds of students choose from an elective pool, the software builds lines that let as many of those choices as possible coexist, and success is measured by how few students miss out on a preference. Room allocation and teacher load fall out of that.

Primary timetabling has almost none of that. Every child in a class stays with that class. There are no lines. The hard part is on the staffing side: giving every classroom teacher their weekly planning-time entitlement to the minute, when the people who release them are specialists with their own load, when a third of the staff work part time, when two teachers job-share one class on a pattern that changes mid-week, and when a meeting that clashes with teaching is a mistake nobody notices until Tuesday.

That is why a secondary product used in a primary school tends to feel oversized and under-specified at the same time. It has an elective engine you will never use and no concept of the entitlement that is the whole reason you are building a timetable.

The shortlist

Who each option is actually built for.

Ordered by how close each product sits to an Australian primary school, not by preference. Bell Path's own row carries the same weakest-when column as everyone else's.

Bell PathThis site

Australian, built by a Victorian primary teacher

Australian primary schools only

Evaluation

Setup and the public sample before purchase; generation is payment-gated

Strongest when

Planning time, part-timers, job-shares and specialist rotations are the hard part, and the timetable also has to drive daily cover, yard duty, wet day plans, events and staff views

Weakest when

You need a free trial before committing, Australian-only data residency as a procurement condition, or any secondary timetabling at all

DayGrid

Australian

Australian primary schools

Evaluation

30-day full-access trial, no credit card

Strongest when

Class list creation matters as much as timetabling, Australian hosting is a stated requirement, and you want to try the product before any conversation

Weakest when

You need the operational week after the timetable: daily cover, wet day, event timetables and an operations calendar

Tes Timetable (formerly Edval)

Australian origin, now part of Tes

Secondary primarily, with a primary offering

Evaluation

Demo only; no public pricing

Strongest when

You are a large or secondary school, you want a mature product with integrations, or you want to buy a human timetabler alongside the software

Weakest when

You are a small primary school that wants to run the setup yourself and see the price before a sales conversation

Timetabling Solutions

Australian, Geelong and Brisbane, established 1984

Secondary, widely used by independent schools

Evaluation

Purchase, with paid training courses available

Strongest when

You want the longest Australian track record in the category and are willing to invest in training, or to buy timetable construction as a service

Weakest when

You want a cloud product rather than a desktop application, or you are a primary school without a dedicated timetabler

Griddle (Compass)

Australian, built with Deakin University

Secondary primarily; integrated with Compass

Evaluation

Demo, with a switching offer for schools on another product

Strongest when

Your school already runs on Compass and eliminating double-handling between timetable and events is the priority

Weakest when

You are not a Compass school, or your problem is primary planning time rather than student-centric scheduling

aSc Timetables

Slovakia

Schools worldwide, primary and secondary

Evaluation

Unlimited free trial; export is watermarked until you buy

Strongest when

You want to prove the engine can solve your school before spending anything, or you need a product available in many languages

Weakest when

You need Australian planning-time entitlements, yard duty, or terminology that matches your staffroom

FET

Open source, Romania

Anyone, with no commercial support

Evaluation

Free, permanently

Strongest when

Budget is the binding constraint and you have someone technical who enjoys the setup

Weakest when

You need support, Australian context, or anything that happens after the timetable is generated

What to ask

Seven questions that separate the options quickly.

Ask any vendor these. The answers sort the category faster than a feature list will.

01

Does it know what planning time is called in my state, and how much my teachers get?

Australian planning-time entitlements are set per jurisdiction and they are not the same. Victoria and Tasmania work from a face-to-face teaching cap. New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory publish a fixed weekly release entitlement, and those figures differ by more than two hours a week between the highest and lowest.

The vendor can tell you the entitlement basis for your state without looking it up, and the software enforces it rather than leaving it to the planner to check.

02

What happens when a teacher calls in sick at 7:42am?

Generating a timetable is a once-a-year job. Covering absences is a weekly one, and in most primary schools it is done by a person under time pressure with the timetable printed beside them. If the software stops at generation, that work stays manual for the other forty weeks.

Cover, yard duty and wet day plans read from the published timetable rather than from a second copy of it that somebody has to keep in sync.

03

Can it handle a job-share without me lying to it?

Two teachers sharing one class on a split week is ordinary in Australian primary schools and it breaks a surprising amount of scheduling software. The usual workaround is to enter them as one fictional full-time teacher, which then produces a timetable that gives the wrong person planning time on the wrong day.

You can enter both people, with their real days, and the software allocates each of them their own entitlement.

04

Will it refuse to publish something broken, or will it just publish?

A timetable with a hidden clash or a missed entitlement is worse than no timetable, because it has already been sent to staff. The cost lands on the person who has to explain it.

The product runs a check before publication, and when it fails it names the teacher, the constraint and the fix rather than returning a generic error.

05

Who does the setup, and how long does it take?

Timetabling software has historically assumed a dedicated timetabler. Most Australian primary schools do not have one. The job belongs to an assistant principal who is also teaching.

A school leader can complete the setup themselves in an evening, and the vendor is honest about what that actually took at schools like yours.

06

Where does the data live, and what is actually collected?

Procurement will ask. The strongest answer is usually not a hosting location, it is that a piece of information was never collected in the first place.

The vendor can state its hosting arrangement plainly, and can tell you which parts of the product function without student names at all.

07

Is the price published?

A vendor that will not show a price before a call is telling you the price varies by what it thinks you will pay.

The number is on the website and it is the number you will be invoiced.

Australian compliance

The frameworks that actually apply in Australia

One of the pages currently outranking this one recommends its own product to Australian schools partly on the basis of GDPR compliance. GDPR is the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. An Australian government primary school has no obligation under it, and a vendor citing it as an Australian selling point is telling you it has assembled a country page from a template.

These are the frameworks an Australian school is actually asked about. If a vendor cannot discuss them, it has not sold to an Australian school under real procurement scrutiny.

Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles

Nationally, to the handling of personal information

What it asks

What personal information is collected, why, how it is stored and secured, who it is disclosed to, and how a person can access or correct it. The Notifiable Data Breaches scheme sits under the same Act.

Bell Path

Bell Path publishes a privacy policy written against the Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, plus separate data-processing and security pages for procurement review.

State and territory privacy law

Government schools, under their own jurisdiction

What it asks

Victorian schools work to the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 and its protective data security standards. New South Wales, Queensland and the other jurisdictions each have their own equivalent. The obligation sits with the school, which is why the school asks the vendor.

Bell Path

Bell Path provides a printable school approval pack and a risk assessment intended to be filed with a school-side privacy impact assessment. It supports that review; it does not replace it.

Child Safe Standards and the National Principles

All Australian schools

What it asks

Whether a system that touches children, staff supervision or duty of care can demonstrate who was responsible for what, and when. Yard duty and supervision records fall squarely inside this.

Bell Path

Yard duty rosters, wet day supervision and daily cover all keep a record of who was rostered where, which is the artefact a school needs when a supervision question is asked after the fact.

Safer Technologies 4 Schools (ST4S)

Edtech products assessed for use in Australian schools

What it asks

A national, shared security and privacy assessment so that every school does not have to repeat the same review of the same product.

Bell Path

Bell Path is not currently ST4S-assessed and does not represent itself as such. It publishes an ST4S readiness position so a school can see exactly where that stands before asking.

Data residency

Where a school makes it a procurement condition

What it asks

Whether school data is stored in Australia.

Bell Path

Bell Path does not currently offer Australian-only residency as a standard option. If your school has that as a hard requirement, confirm it before relying on Bell Path. DayGrid publicly states Australian hosting.

Two honest answers

Where Bell Path fits, and where it does not

Bell Path fits if

  • You are an Australian primary school and planning time is the reason the timetable is hard
  • Part-time staff, job-shares, dual-role specialists and specialist rotations all have to coexist
  • You want the timetable to keep working through the term as daily cover, yard duty, wet day plans, event timetables and an operations calendar
  • The person doing this is a school leader, not a timetabler, and wants to finish the setup in an evening
  • You want the price published and a printable approval pack for your School Council or leadership team

Pick something else if

  • You are a secondary school, or a P-12 needing secondary lines and student elective selection
  • You want a free trial before you commit. Bell Path gates generation behind payment; DayGrid offers 30 days free and aSc offers an unlimited trial with watermarked export
  • Australian-only data residency is a hard procurement condition today
  • You want the vendor to build the timetable for you. Tes and Timetabling Solutions both sell that as a service; Bell Path is built for the school to run itself
  • You need student class-list creation. DayGrid does that; Bell Path deliberately does not collect student names for core timetabling

Questions

What schools ask before shortlisting.

  • What is the best timetabling software in Australia?

    It depends on the school type. For Australian secondary schools the established options are Tes Timetable (formerly Edval), Timetabling Solutions and Griddle. For Australian primary schools the purpose-built options are Bell Path and DayGrid, because primary timetabling is a staffing and planning-time problem rather than a student elective problem. aSc Timetables and the free, open-source FET are viable but carry no Australian context.

  • Is there free timetabling software for Australian schools?

    FET is free and open source, permanently, but it is a desktop application with a steep learning curve and no support, and it knows nothing about Australian planning-time entitlements. aSc Timetables offers an unlimited free trial where only the export is watermarked, so you can prove it solves your school before paying. DayGrid offers a 30-day full-access trial with no credit card.

  • Why is primary school timetabling different from secondary?

    Secondary timetabling is driven by student subject selection: the software builds lines so that as many student elective choices as possible can coexist. Primary classes stay together all day, so there are no lines. The difficulty in primary is entirely on the staffing side: delivering each teacher their planning-time entitlement to the minute, around part-time patterns, job-shares, specialist rotations and meetings.

  • Does GDPR apply to Australian schools?

    No. GDPR is European Union law. An Australian school is governed by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles, plus its own state or territory privacy legislation, alongside Child Safe Standards. A vendor offering GDPR compliance as a reason for an Australian school to buy is describing the wrong jurisdiction.

  • How much does school timetabling software cost in Australia?

    Published pricing is uncommon in this category. Tes Timetable, Timetabling Solutions and Griddle all require a demo or a quote. Among products that publish, DayGrid starts from $1,495 per year excluding GST and scales by school size, and Bell Path publishes both its founding-school and standard pricing on its pricing page. FET is free.

  • What is planning time called in each Australian state?

    It varies. Victoria uses APT (additional planning time), New South Wales uses RFF (release from face-to-face), Queensland and the Northern Territory use NCT (non-contact time), South Australia uses NIT (non-instruction time), and Western Australia uses DOTT (duties other than teaching). Victoria and Tasmania derive the entitlement from a face-to-face teaching cap; the others publish a fixed weekly release figure.

  • Is Bell Path suitable for secondary schools?

    No. Bell Path is built for Australian primary schools only and does not do student elective selection or secondary line construction. A secondary or P-12 school should look at Tes Timetable, Timetabling Solutions or Griddle.

Sources checked July 25, 2026

Vendor positioning, pricing and evaluation terms change. Every row above was checked against the vendor’s own public pages on the review date. Verify current details with each provider before making a decision.

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Best Timetabling Software in Australia (2026) | Primary Schools | Bell Path