‘It was just an Excel spreadsheet out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it…’
At the beginning of the academic year, perhaps two thoughts reign over all others in pupils’ minds: the first laments the ending of the Summer holidays; the second prays for good timetables. Five timetables in, I can safely make no generalisations.
With such varying experience, one can’t help but grow curious about the process. One’s curiosity might then be further heightened when remembering the sheer volume of people to be sorted: over a thousand pupils and around 150 teachers are, before the year begins, to be arranged across free periods and myriad classrooms around the campus. Certainly, mine was, so I reached out to Dr Meisner and secured a brief interview with him.
It is perhaps natural to assume that such tasks would be largely automated, requiring little oversight except for final checks. I came up with this article thinking I would be able to go into some of the maths of optimization algorithms. I was mistaken in this assumption and quite shocked to see that timetabling is still largely manual. I am told that an automatic alternative will be trialled soon, however.
My account of the process is abridged – I’m going off whatever scrawl I see in my A6 notebook. It starts with the subject choices from the Third Form, the Fourth Form and the Lower Sixth because these are the year groups who have opted into various subjects which are grouped in blocks, each one given a letter of the alphabet. The challenge is making sensibly sized groups of each subject in the blocks while accommodating everyone’s options. For example, my Physics set completely overlaps with my Maths set. This process roughly operates in priority order based on the size of the department – Arabic and Russian have just one teacher each, and so they place constraints around which the other sets are arranged. Then, based on these sets, a model timetable is created around Sixth Form allocations: A, B, C, and D blocks. The aim here is to constrain the number of lessons in each period to fit the number of teaching staff and rooms available. Of course, sometimes this framework leaves out the odd set, leading to a certain Maths set’s otherwise inexplicable banishment from SciTec to Cloisters on a Monday afternoon. Thus is the titular question answered, but there is yet more to discuss.
Sixth Form PRs, and the supervised equivalents for the Fourth and Fifth form (the existence of which leaves the eleven-GCSE old guard very disgruntled) are perhaps the greatest saving grace in this procedure. Dr Meisner described them as a sort of metaphorical grease that keeps the timetabling from grinding itself to a halt. In the Sixth Form, there are 7 lessons that can be allocated per subject per week of which one is converted to a PR, with the expectation that we get something done during that time. Sending the Sixth Form back to House or the Library or some corner of SciTec, and the Fourth and Fifth Forms to some unoccupied teacher to work privately, is a convenient solution that reduces the difficulty of timetabling in addition to being beneficial in developing their independent learning.
This metaphorical ‘grease’ is balanced by the difficulties of adding in the occasional ‘period zero’ (‘Good riddance!’ the Upper Sixth say, as we no longer have to get out early to start lessons at 8.30) because these period zeroes follow a stricter set of rules than regular fifty-minute periods: for GCSE students and below, these create one 75-minute lesson per fortnight to allow more time for practical work.
Some lesson times are fixed at the beginning of the process: on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the First and Second form have their creative subjects, and the Upper Sixth Form have Sixth Form lectures before lunch on Fridays. In addition, Chapel dictates the placements of Period 0s, which then influences the rest of the timetable.
Behind these results is a biblically awesome Excel spreadsheet, discussion of which I shall keep mercifully (regretfully) brief. Essentially it sports very powerful lookup functions that cover year groups, days, and subjects that make checking for mistakes a great deal easier than it would otherwise be. After all, the timetable sheet has data on every set within the School and is gargantuan. Heads of Department also play an influential role by allocating teachers as they see fit. The process involves some back-and-forth to make sure everything is as it should be.
We close with two small miscellaneous excerpts of the interview for the reader’s amusement, and my thanks to Dr Meisner for both the interview and his work.
‘Just how long does it take to do this?’
‘A very long time.’
‘Is it fun?’
‘Most of the time.’
