The yard duty roster: fair, covered, and out of the staffroom conversation.

Yard duty — playground duty in NSW — is a child-safety system first and a workload-distribution system second. The first job is absolute: every zone covered, every break, every day, including the oval nobody can see from the office and the ten minutes before the first bell. The second job is what determines whether the roster generates grievances: staff notice unfairness with forensic precision.

Design for both from the start. A roster that achieves coverage by quietly overloading the same six agreeable people is not a roster — it is a slow leak in staff goodwill that presents, months later, as "morale".

Start from supervision requirements, not staff availability: which areas need eyes during which windows, at what ratio, given your grounds and your students. Before-school, recess, lunch (often split into eating and play), after-school, and bus duty each have their own shape. Some zones need two adults; some need an adult with specific first-aid or fixed-equipment knowledge.

Write the zone map down formally. When a duty is missed, "I did not know the far oval was mine" is a systems failure, not a person failure — and it is preventable with an unambiguous map, clear handover times, and duties printed on each teacher's own timetable rather than on a laminated sheet in the staffroom.

The only defensible fairness measure is a running count per person across the term: duties assigned, duties actually done, duties absorbed from other people's absences. Week-by-week eyeballing systematically hides imbalance, because the person who "just this once" covered a Friday lunch duty four separate times looks fine on any single week's view.

Set the loading rules explicitly and publish them: how full-time load is calculated, how part-time load is pro-rated, which roles carry reduced or zero load (principal class, staff with negotiated arrangements), and how time-of-week desirability is balanced — Friday afternoon duty and Monday-before-school duty are not the same duty, and staff know it.

Then track against the rules. When someone claims the roster is unfair, the answer should be a ledger you can show, whichever way the conversation is about to go.

Part-time staff take pro-rata duty on the days they actually attend — which sounds obvious until the roster generator (human or software) spreads duties evenly across a week that includes their days off. Their available days then carry proportionally more duty, which is correct, and worth explaining before someone reads their Tuesday as punishment.

Fixed recurring duties — the teacher who always takes the bus gate because they park there, the assistant principal who covers the front office window — are fine, but they need to be recorded as fixed and counted in that person's load. The same goes for exemptions. Every school has exemption folklore; the roster only stays defensible when the folklore is converted into written rules that a new daily organiser can apply without a séance.

Rain converts an outdoor supervision problem into an indoor one with completely different geometry: classrooms and corridors instead of zones, different ratios, different sight-lines. If the wet-day version of the roster is improvised at 12:40 under a grey sky, the same reliable people get grabbed every time — unfairness again, now with added chaos.

Build the wet-day mapping in advance: each outdoor duty converts to a defined indoor supervision post, and the conversion is one decision ("wet day timetable is on"), not forty. The fairness ledger should keep counting through wet days — indoor duty is still duty.

Every staff absence potentially breaks the duty roster, and this is where rosters quietly rot: the absent teacher's duty gets handed to whoever is standing nearest, the swap is never recorded, and by week eight the official roster and reality have diverged.

Duty reallocation belongs inside the same morning workflow as class cover, not as an afterthought. When cover is arranged for an absent teacher, their duties should surface in the same view, get reassigned deliberately — ideally to whoever is furthest under their fair-share line — and get recorded so the ledger stays true.

Bell Path generates yard duty rosters from your real zone map and bell times, with a year-to-date fairness ledger per staff member, pro-rata handling for part-timers, explicit fixed-duty and exemption rules, and lunchtime club commitments respected. Wet day plans convert outdoor posts to indoor supervision in the same screen, and daily cover reallocates an absent teacher's duties alongside their classes — so the roster on the wall and the roster in reality stay the same document.