Software for principals
One place to run the school week: timetable, cover, yard duty, events and staff views.
Bell Path is planning software for Australian primary school leaders. It does not replace Compass, Sentral, CASES21, OneSchool, eduPay or Department systems. It handles the planning work those tools do not cover.
Already run one? Send the file and it is in Bell Path within 48 hours, with Daily Cover free for two weeks.
You are running the school week across four tools and want one.
The timetable is in one place, cover in another, duty on paper, and events in a calendar nobody else can see. Every handover between them depends on a person remembering to do it.
Principals and assistant principals already use many tools: Compass or Sentral for attendance, reporting and often daily organisation, CASES21 for school administration and finance, eduPay for payroll, and email for everything else. Those systems can record absences, book replacement staff and hold a duty roster.
Bell Path starts one step earlier. It builds the primary timetable around each teacher’s planning time, then runs daily cover, yard duty, wet day plans, event timetables, an operations calendar, education support planning and a staff portal from that same timetable, so each of them already knows who is teaching where.
It does not replace your school information system, attendance or reporting. It replaces the spreadsheets, whiteboards, email threads and memory that currently hold the planning together.
What goes wrong without it.
The weekly timetable, cover arrangements, duty roster, and event plans live in separate spreadsheets maintained by different people.
When a teacher is absent, the daily organiser rebuilds coverage from scratch using memory and side notes.
Yard duty rosters and wet day plans are static documents that do not reflect the current week.
Event timetables for swimming, sports day, or photo day are one-off spreadsheets built from scratch each time.
Staff ask "where do I need to be?" and no single system can answer quickly.
What Bell Path does.
What it handles
- Timetable building with part-time teachers, job-shares, planning time, meetings, rooms and specialist rotations
- An operations calendar for camps, excursions, sport days, deadlines and same-morning changes
- Daily cover that tracks who has covered what, so the load is shared fairly across the term
- Yard duty rosters with a whole-year fairness record, including lunchtime clubs
- Wet day plans that switch the outdoor roster to indoor supervision on the same screen
- Event timetables for photo day, swimming, sports rotations and health checks, printable and shareable
- Education support planning with support minutes per student
- Staff portal with published personal views, supported requests, time-in-lieu claims, duty swaps, and notification preferences; timetable editing stays with the planner
Why schools choose Bell Path
- One place for the planning work instead of a patchwork of spreadsheets and whiteboards
- Designed for principals and assistant principals, not IT administrators or timetabling consultants
- Works alongside Compass, Sentral, CASES21 and your other school systems rather than replacing them
- Teachers check their schedule, cover and duty in one place, the staff portal
- Built for Australian primary schools, with privacy documentation ready for your procurement review
Planning stories.
Composite examples of common planning situations, not reports from one school.
FAQ
Questions schools ask before they start.
Does Bell Path replace Compass or Sentral?
No. Compass, Sentral and similar platforms handle attendance, reporting and parent communication, and some schools also use their daily organisation tools. Bell Path builds the timetable and runs cover, duty, events and staff views from it. Schools keep their existing system for attendance and reporting.
Does Bell Path replace CASES21 or eduPay?
No. CASES21 handles school administration and finance, and eduPay handles payroll. Bell Path handles the planning work those systems do not cover.
What does the staff portal show teachers?
Each linked teacher sees their own published weekly schedule, including teaching sessions, cover assignments, yard duty, and meetings. They can make supported requests, submit time-in-lieu claims, request duty swaps, and manage notification preferences. Timetable editing stays with the planner, and staff do not see other teachers' full schedules or sensitive planning data.
Is Bell Path suitable for a school that already has a timetable tool?
If your current tool only builds the timetable, Bell Path can still be useful for daily cover, yard duty, event timetables and the operations calendar. You get the most from it when the timetable and the day-to-day running of the week are in the same place.
How quickly can a school get started?
Setup is a series of guided steps for classes, staff, rooms, meetings and rules, so a school leader can build a first draft without any experience of scheduling software. A small school takes about an hour and a large one takes longer.
Publish a timetable you can trust.
Send the timetable you already have and we load it within 48 hours, with Daily Cover free for two weeks. Building a new one? Setting up your school and previewing part of it is free.