Guides
Guides for the people who run the school week.
Practical guides on timetabling, planning time, yard duty and daily cover, written for Australian primary schools by the team behind Bell Path. No sign-up required.
Free tools
Run your own numbers first. No sign-up needed.
Planning 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 actually 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
Build the timetable
10 min readUpdated 20 Aug 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. The order you make decisions in matters more than the tool you use. This guide walks through the order experienced timetablers follow, and the mistakes that cause a rebuild halfway through the term.
Read the guide9 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
Planning time in Australian primary schools: APT, RFF, DOTT, NIT and NCT, explained.
Planning time is the weekly release from face-to-face teaching that every Australian primary teacher is entitled to. Victoria calls it APT, New South Wales RFF, Queensland NCT, Western Australia DOTT and South Australia NIT. The name changes, but the problem is the same everywhere: release time must be delivered to the minute, every week, and someone must teach the class while you do.
Read the guide6 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
The pre-publish 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). Staff judge a timetable by the errors they find, not by the hundreds of sessions that were right. Run this checklist before publishing and the timetable stays out of the staffroom conversation.
Read the guide8 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
Specialist rotations: the timetable inside the timetable.
A specialist rotation is the pattern in which Art, PE, Music and other specialist teachers move through a school's classes each week, releasing each classroom teacher for planning as they go. It 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.
Read the guide7 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. Every school has one. Very few have one that is still accurate by week five. The difference is planning backwards from fixed dates, spacing the load, and keeping exactly one version.
Read the guideRun the week
8 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
The yard duty roster: covered, fair, and out of the staffroom conversation.
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. Nobody notices a good one. Everybody notices an unfair one. This guide covers coverage, fairness counting, part-timer loading, and the wet-day plan: the four things that decide whether your roster lasts the term.
Read the guide
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. Every morning, someone turns a list of absent staff into that plan. This guide makes the decision sequence explicit, and shows where fairness and planning time quietly leak.
Read the guide
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. A staffing change does not have to mean a fresh timetable and another round of disruption.
Read the guide
7 min readUpdated 20 Aug 2026
Wet day plans: decide at 8:40, not at 12:40.
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. Rain turns a solved supervision problem into an unsolved one with a deadline. The schools that handle it calmly all do the same four things, and none of them happen on the day.
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Printables
Free template
Term planner template
An eleven-week grid. Put the dates you cannot move in first, then space everything else around them.
Open and printFree template
Yard duty roster template
A blank weekly duty roster with a term fairness tally, so coverage and fairness can be checked at a glance.
Open and print
See it for yourself
See a complete generated week.
Bell Path generated a full week for a sample primary school, teacher by teacher, and published it. Read it before you sign up for anything.
19 classes, every teacher released, plus the yard duty roster.