Free tool
Yard duty fairness checker
Duty rosters drift. Not because anyone intends it, but because the people who never say no end up on the list more often, and nobody is counting until somebody complains.
Paste your term counts and see the shape of it. If the roster is fair, you now have something to show. If it is not, you know before the staff meeting.
Go to the yard duty fairness checker
This runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is submitted, saved, or sent anywhere, and there is no signup.
One person per line, name then the number of duties this term. Paste straight from a spreadsheet if you have one.
Across 8 staff
Meaningfully uneven.
Dan Kelso is doing 8 more duties than Jess Whitcombe this term. At that size it is no longer a rounding difference, and it is the sort of thing that gets raised at a staff meeting rather than in private.
- Average
- 11.8
- Spread
- 8
- Highest
- 16
- Lowest
- 8
- Dan Kelso16+4.3
- Sam O'Doherty15+3.3
- Alex Bennett14+2.3
- Tom Nguyen13+1.3
- Ruth Farrelly10-1.8
- Priya Raman9-2.8
- Marnie Clark9-2.8
- Jess Whitcombe8-3.8
Counting duties equally assumes every duty costs the same. In practice a wet Monday lunch on the far oval is not the same as a Friday morning gate, and a duty on someone ’s heaviest teaching day costs more than one on a lighter day. A fair roster weighs those too.
How this works
What the numbers above are doing.
Spread beats average
The average tells you almost nothing on its own. The gap between the person doing the most and the person doing the least is what staff actually experience, and it is what gets raised.
Fifteen per cent is the quiet zone
A spread inside roughly fifteen per cent of the average rarely draws comment. Beyond about a third of the average, it reliably does.
Counts are not the whole story
Equal counts can still be unfair if one person always gets the far oval in winter, or duty on the day they teach five straight sessions. Treat this as the first check, not the last.
Questions
Common follow-ups.
How even does a duty roster need to be?
There is no published standard, and departmental guidance generally says rosters should be fair, equitable and transparent without defining a number. As a working rule, a spread inside about fifteen per cent of the average rarely draws comment. Past about a third, people notice, and they are usually right to.
Is counting duties really the right measure of fairness?
It is the starting point, not the whole answer. A wet Monday lunch on the far oval is not the same job as a Friday morning gate, and a duty on a teacher’s heaviest teaching day costs more than the same duty on a lighter one. Counts catch the obvious imbalance. Position, timing and teaching load catch the rest.
Why does this matter beyond goodwill?
Duty is supervision, and supervision sits inside child safety obligations. Being able to show who was rostered where, and that the roster was allocated on a defensible basis, is the record a school wants to have already if a question is ever asked after an incident.
Can Bell Path keep this record automatically?
Yes. Bell Path builds duty rosters from your accepted timetable, balances them across the term, avoids stacking duty onto a teacher’s heaviest days where it can, and keeps a running year-to-date fairness ledger you can show a staff member who asks.
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