Guides
Guides for the people who run the school week.
Practical, Australian-primary-specific writing on timetabling, planning time, yard duty, and daily cover — from the team behind Bell Path. No sign-up required.
12 min read
How to build a primary school timetable, step by step.
The order you make timetabling decisions in matters more than the tool you make them with. This guide walks through the sequence experienced timetablers use — and the traps that cause the mid-term rewrite.
Read the guide10 min read
Planning time in Australian primary schools: APT, RFF, DOTT, NIT and NCT, explained.
Every state calls it something different, but the problem is the same everywhere: release time is an entitlement you must deliver to the minute, every week, and someone must teach the class while you do.
Read the guide9 min read
The yard duty roster: fair, covered, and out of the staffroom conversation.
Nobody notices a good duty roster. Everybody notices an unfair one. This guide covers coverage, fairness accounting, part-timer loading, and the wet-day plan — the four things that decide whether your roster survives the term.
Read the guide10 min read
Covering teacher absences without burning the same five people.
The daily organiser's morning is a solved-in-your-head logistics problem with a deadline of first bell. This guide makes the decision sequence explicit — and shows where fairness and planning time quietly leak.
Read the guide7 min read
The pre-publish timetable checklist: what to verify before staff see it.
Staff trust is spent on the errors they find, not earned on the sessions that were right. Run this checklist before publishing and the timetable conversation stays boring — which is the goal.
Read the guide8 min read
How much does school timetabling software cost — and what does "free" really cost?
Almost no vendor in this market publishes numbers, which tells you something. Here is how the pricing actually works, where the hidden costs sit, and how to compare options honestly — including staying on spreadsheets.
Read the guide9 min read
Specialist rotations: the timetable inside the timetable.
The specialist program touches every class, every teacher's release time, and half the room bookings in the school. Design it deliberately and the rest of the timetable gets easier; improvise it and everything downstream wobbles.
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