Guide
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.
Updated 20 August 20267 min read
Key takeaways
- A wet day plan is a standing conversion of the duty roster: every outdoor zone maps to a defined indoor post, decided once, not negotiated every time it rains.
- Name the decision: one role calls "wet day timetable on", by a set time, on stated triggers. Uncertainty at 12:38 is how corridors go unsupervised.
- Indoor supervision has a different geography (corridors, sight-lines, rooms at capacity), so the mapping needs walking, not just writing.
- Wet-day duty is still duty. The fairness count keeps running, or the same reliable people quietly absorb every rainy lunch all winter.
Why wet days go wrong
The outdoor duty roster is a solved problem: zones, times, names, published. Rain deletes the zones. What is left is a school full of students, indoors, with a supervision plan written for a playground, and about twenty minutes to invent its replacement.
Improvised wet days follow the same script everywhere. Someone grabs whoever is visible, the same agreeable staff say yes, two corridors end up unsupervised because everyone assumed someone else had them, and the classroom teachers who kept their own classes quietly lose the lunch break they were owed. None of that is a people problem. It is a missing-plan problem.
The standing conversion
The core of a wet day plan is a fixed mapping. Each outdoor duty post converts to a defined indoor post: this zone's teacher takes that corridor, that building's classrooms, the library overflow. The person rostered to the oval at lunch is automatically the person at the Year 3/4 corridor when the wet day timetable is on. One decision switches the whole roster, and nobody is recruited on the spot.
Design the mapping against the building, not the org chart: the corridors and wet areas where students actually gather, rooms with capacity limits, stairwells and blind corners, and the walking distance between a teacher's outdoor zone and their indoor post. Walk it once with the map in hand. The mismatches are obvious on foot and invisible on paper.
Name the caller, the deadline and the trigger
Every wet day plan needs three named things: who calls it (one role, with a deputy), by when (a decision time before each break; a morning call for the day beats a scramble at the bell), and on what triggers. Rain, obviously, but also heat, wind, smoke and waterlogged grounds. The plan is really an indoor supervision plan, and schools that name it that way use it more consistently.
The call then needs one broadcast that reaches everyone the same way every time (staffroom screen, group message, PA), using the same words: "wet day timetable is on for lunch." Staff who hear a consistent signal stop asking the office one by one, which removes half the chaos by itself.
Keep the fairness count running
Indoor duty is duty. If the wet-day conversion quietly adds posts (more corridors than zones, or split shifts so teachers get part of their break), those additions must land in the same fairness count as everything else, or winter terms slowly overload the staff whose rooms happen to sit near the busy corridors.
The same applies to classroom teachers who supervise their own class through a wet lunch. That is supervision time too. Whether your school credits it, rotates it, or rosters relief for it is a policy choice, but count it, because staff certainly do.
The students' half of the plan
Supervision is half the wet day. The other half is what 400 students actually do indoors for forty minutes. Rooms with named quiet activities, a film room, board games that only come out on wet days, and clear rules for moving between spaces do more for behaviour than any amount of extra supervision. Build this half once too, and refresh it each term, because wet-day novelty wears off.
How Bell Path handles it
Bell Path stores your outdoor-to-indoor mapping as a standing wet day plan. Declaring a wet day converts the current duty roster to indoor posts, staff see their changed post in the staff portal and on the staffroom display, and the fairness count keeps running through the conversion. Because it works from the live roster, an absence that morning is already reflected: the covering teacher inherits the indoor post too.
Common questions
- Who should decide when a wet day timetable applies?
- One named role, commonly the daily organiser or an assistant principal, with a deputy for their absences, deciding by a set time before each break against stated triggers. Who it is matters less than there being exactly one.
- How do we map outdoor duty zones to indoor posts?
- Start from where students actually gather indoors (corridors, wet areas, library, halls), set posts against sight-lines and room capacity, then give each outdoor post an indoor equivalent so the existing roster converts automatically. Walk the mapping once before you publish it.
- Does yard duty fairness still count on wet days?
- It should. Indoor supervision is the same work in a different place, and wet-day conversions often add posts. If the fairness count skips rainy days, the winter term quietly overloads whoever sits nearest the busy corridors.
- What belongs in a wet day plan document?
- The trigger conditions and decision time, who calls it, the zone-to-post mapping, room capacity notes, the broadcast wording, the student activity arrangements per area, and where relief teachers fit. One page, updated more often than it is laminated.
In Bell Path
One step from oval to corridor
Bell Path converts your duty roster to the standing wet day plan in one step: posts reassigned, staff told, fairness still counting.
See wet day planningKeep reading
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.
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.
Wet day plan software
When it rains, Bell Path takes the teachers already on yard duty and gives each one an indoor zone. The wet day plan prints from the same page as the normal roster.
Yard duty roster software
Bell Path builds the yard duty roster and shows you every unfilled duty before the week is printed, stops one teacher being booked on two zones at once, and keeps a record of who was on duty. The fairness ledger sits right beside it, in hours and in counts, for the whole year.