Why building a school timetable still takes weeks
Most schools rebuild their timetable from scratch every term. Here is where the time actually goes and which parts a machine should be doing.
By Skejuu Team
Ask any vice principal what they dread most about resumption week and you will hear the same answer: the timetable. Not the admissions rush, not the fee reconciliation. The timetable.
Where the weeks actually go
The work is rarely the first draft. A competent scheduler can sketch a rough grid for a 12-class school in an afternoon. The weeks disappear into everything that happens after that draft meets reality.
- Teacher availability arrives late. Two teachers resign in August, one goes on maternity leave, and a new hire only confirms three days before resumption.
- Constraints are unwritten. The senior maths teacher does not take first period. The lab is unavailable on Wednesdays. PE cannot run at noon. None of this lives in a document. It lives in someone's head.
- Every fix breaks something else. Moving one double period to resolve a clash creates two new clashes elsewhere. This cascade is the real cost.
The part humans are good at
Humans are excellent at the judgement calls. Which teacher can handle a difficult class after lunch. Whether a subject deserves a double period. When to break a rule because a specific student needs it.
Humans are terrible at the other part: holding forty simultaneous constraints in working memory and checking every one of them after every single change. That is arithmetic, and it scales badly.
What should be automated
The clash detection. The propagation. The "if I move this, what else moves" question. A scheduler should be able to say move JSS2 Maths to Tuesday second period and immediately see every consequence, resolved or flagged.
That is the boundary we drew when building Skejuu. You describe the school in your own words, by voice or text, and the system holds the constraints. You keep the judgement.
A reasonable target
A school with 15 classes and 30 teachers should have a working, conflict-free timetable in an afternoon, not a fortnight. Not because anyone is working faster, but because nobody is doing arithmetic by hand.