Guides for primary school leaders.
Practical guides on timetabling, planning time, yard duty and daily cover, written for Australian primary schools by the team behind Bell Path.
Build the timetable
5 guides
10 min readUpdated 20 Sept 2026
How to build a primary school timetable, step by step.
To build a primary school timetable, collect every staffing fact first, place planning time and specialist rotations before anything else, then check each teacher's week before staff see it.
9 min readUpdated 4 Oct 2026
Planning time in primary schools: APT, RFF, NCT, DOTT and NIT.
Planning time is the weekly release from face-to-face teaching that every Australian primary teacher is entitled to.
6 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
The school timetable checklist: what to check before staff see it.
Before staff see a new timetable, check every per-person promise (planning time to the minute, part-timer days, job-share handovers) and every structural one (rooms, meetings, duty coverage, bell times).
8 min readUpdated 20 Sept 2026
How to build a primary school specialist timetable.
A specialist timetable needs to fit each class's lessons, specialist teachers' working days and available rooms.
7 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
The term planner: a whole term on one page, and how to keep it true.
A term planner shows the shape of a school term on one page, week by week: the fixed dates, the heavy weeks and the clear ones.
Run the week
5 guides
8 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
The yard duty roster: covered every break, fair all term.
A yard duty roster puts a named staff member on every supervised zone for every break, every day, and spreads that load fairly across the term.
9 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
Covering teacher absences without wearing out the same five people.
Covering a teacher absence means deciding, before the first bell, who takes each class, duty and meeting the absent teacher leaves behind, and recording whose planning time paid for it.
8 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
How to change a school timetable without rebuilding the whole week.
To change a school timetable mid-year without rebuilding it, keep the published week as your baseline, change the underlying staffing fact rather than the cells, compare how much the new version moves, and publish one clearly current version.
7 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
How to run wet day plans in a primary school.
A wet day plan is a standing conversion of the yard duty roster: every outdoor zone maps to a named indoor post, decided once, so one call switches the whole roster when it rains.
9 min readUpdated 2 Sept 2026
Time in lieu in primary schools: what counts, how to record it, and how to give it back.
Time in lieu is the time a teacher or education support employee is owed when the principal requires them to work beyond their normal hours.
Choosing software
5 articles
How much does school timetabling software cost in Australia?
School timetabling software in Australia is usually priced per school per year, flat or tiered by enrolment, and many vendors quote only after a demo.
What to look for in timetabling software
What primary timetabling software has to handle: part-timers, job-shares, rooms, meetings, planning time in your state’s words, cover and yard duty.
The Australian market compared
The main products compared in one table, with seven questions to ask and the privacy rules that apply.
Software for the school office
What Bell Path covers for school leaders, beside Compass, CASES21 and eduPay.
Wet day plan software
Move the yard duty roster indoors in one step, with a teacher already on duty in every wet-day room.
Free tools you can use without signing up
All free toolsPlanning time calculator
Weekly planning-time entitlement for any Australian state, full time or part time, using the same calculation Bell Path uses.
Open the toolSpecialist coverage checker
Compare the planning time your school owes against the specialist sessions it can supply, before you build the timetable.
Open the toolYard duty fairness checker
Paste your term duty counts and see instantly who is carrying more than their share, and by how much.
Open the tool
Printables
See a complete generated week.
Bell Path generated a full week for a sample primary school, teacher by teacher. You can read all of it without signing up.
19 classes, every teacher released, plus the yard duty roster.