[sims] Peri Music Timetabling

[johnston63]

Has anyone ever come up with a brilliant solution to this kind of old-fashioned, cut and paste paper operation?

 

Students need to come out of timetabled lessons for music lessons on a rolling programme that avoids hitting the same lesson every week and also has to take account of when students are at off-site PE and Dance Provision.

 

Sometimes the lessons are individual ones, sometimes in ensembles.

 

At present it is done by wading through paper student timetables, the whole school timetable and the peri music teacher's availability and groupings. There is nothing in SIMS that is of much help.

 

Any help gratefully received.

 

L.

[smurfomatic]

I'm sure there must be a better solution but we've never found one! Individual (plus ensemble) music and drama are done on a five week rolling programme here, timetable worked out as above - peri teacher availability, avoiding the same lessons every week and then dealing with a teacher who complains about it...

 

Fortunately that's all done by the music department at the moment...

[johnston63]

Ha - thank you. It is enormously reassuring to know we are not the only ones dealing with this in exactly this way. Until someone writes an enormously complicated Excel sheet.

[smurfomatic]

I have no idea how the music staff deal with it all. It will be interesting to see what happens as the person who currently organises it leaves at Christmas. They better not come knocking on my door to sort it out!

 

There will be a way to do it more easily, but with variable lesson lengths and break times to add into the mix, it'd probably take all the school's spare CPU time a week to work out the permutations.

[johnston63]

I wish you joy of that. Meantime I'll tell music to continue with the paper and scissors. Thanks for all that.