DavidHayton

Hi WarriorPrincess, Congratulations on your timetable! Great to hear that you are hearing such positive comments about it. If you are interested in trialling Timetabler, you can get a free download from their website: www.timetabler.com If you get stuck, send them an email: [email protected]. In fact, send them an email anyway - their support line is superb. David Hayton King Henry VIII School, Coventry

Mortstar, I am sorry if I have given you the impression that I am in any way dismissive of support staff in schools. Thank you for getting the issue of your chest. I suspect that there have been other support staff watching my debate with Sivadam over the past few days so it is helpful for me to put the record straight here and apologise if, within my postings, I have given a bad impression. However, I do suspect that my perspective on timetabling is different to yours: I don't think that it is an admin task. I'm not trying to make any comment about the value of individuals working within a school, I'm simply making an observation. I agree with Mervyn Wakefield on this point so rather than waffle on, I'll attach the relevant link to his website: http://www.mervynwakefield.co.uk/documents/RemodellingandTimetabling_001.pdf David

Sivadam, I am sorry to have upset you. All I had to go on was your very impressive grasp of the relevant jargon. I worried at the time that I was making a misjudgment - hence my qualified apology in the previous posting. David

Hi Sivadam, I'm sorry, I know you have had enough of our little debate but I did want to pick up on one or two comments that you brought up in your last post. I've not had a problem with timetable changes during the year. I indicate the start and end dates of a timetable during the import into SIMS. So putting two or more timetables in for different portions of the year isn't a problem. But, to be honest, we have few changes during the year and I have not found it a problem to edit staff and rooms within SIMS.net. I will however, ask Keith Johnson to take a look at what Nova can do is this respect. Timetabler is improved every year in response to users' feedback. Timetabler doesn't have a problem with what you call "facilities"; it calls them "special resources". Different name - same thing as far as I can see. But can't every timetabling package do this sort of thing by using dummy teachers? For example the Music Room can be encoded as (ficticious) teacher ZMU who "team-teaches" with real teachers. What I suspect is happenning is that you and I are coming to timetabling from different perspectives. Judging by your use of jargon, you are coming from an admin/IT side (apologies if I have misjudged this) and to you dummy teachers could risk upsetting the data base if they ended up in SIMS.net. I come into timetabling as a teacher and for me the experience of teachers and children is paramount. That said, even if I use dummy teachers, Timetabler whips them out at the export-import stage so SIMS doesn't get upset with me. This is one of the reasons that I use Timetabler. Their helpline is superb and they have never left me in the lurch (unlike the Capita trainer whose job it was to help me.) I think that there is a key difference here between Timetabler and Nova. Timetabler's priority list (means that the difficult pieces are always brought to the top of the pile) and fit algorithm (moving already-fitted lessons around in order to fit subsequent lessons) mean that - for me - the last few groups do fit according to the wishes of HoDs. I am often working at the level of ensuring the best possible pattern and spread of lessons throughout the week (e.g, trying to avoid 2 lessons on adjacent days when the allocation was 2ppw). I must admit though to doing a significant amount of pre-planning with combing charts and conflict matrices (timetabler does all this) before I start scheduling. Even Timetabler would fail me if I tried to get it to do the equivalent of making two parallel lines meet. I can't see us coming to an agreement on this point, but I do think every school should look at a range of packages (including Nova and timetabler) before deciding which is better for their school - whereas at the moment there seem to be too many people who just assume Nova is best, without ever looking at what else is available. I think that they owe it to the teachers and children in their school to find the best software, and you can' do that by only looking at one program (Nova) and then declaring that 'the winner'! That said, I do agree with you that we have probably spent enough time cluttering up this board. If you want to take our debate any further, maybe better if I bought you a beer sometime and we talked properly. Best wishes, David

Thank you for your reply, Sivadam. You are now the fourth Nova devotee to tell me that it must have been possible to encode the curriculum plan, but then left me to my own devices. The first was the Capita trainer. There was also a Nova user in another school who sent it to his LEA Capita-SIMS support line (who never replied). The problem is now hypothetical as it occurred in a Year 11 scheme that my predecessor had implemented for Year 10 the previous year. I have since simplified the KS4 plan so this would no longer prevent me from using Nova. However, since Timetabler solved the problem easily I stuck with it and I have got used to its functions. There are things that I can do in Timetabler (such as the a-la-carte arrangements for sixth form maths and double maths lessons that the head of maths requests. e.g, the two lessons taught by ABC must be at the same time as any two of the four lessons taught by DEF, whilst at least two of the three lessons taught by GHI and JKL must be at different times ... it goes on! It all tailors the maths provision to the students and enables individuals to study units relevant to their interests.) Timetabler allows me to create and use "dummy" teachers to act as team-teachers, in order to maintain maximum flexibility. I presume that there is a similar mechanism in T6 but it would take me ages to become proficient. There is one big advantage to using pencil and paper - when a colleague presents an "observation" or "comment" on the finished product. Having used pencil and paper, you could explain exactly why the situation has arisen, what your thinking was, what the alternatives were and why you had to do what you had to do. Timetabler enables me to do just that whilst sweeping away the disadvantages that are so obvious with paper based methods. My predecessor used another package and he would generally resort to comments such as "that is what the computer came up with". No doubt it is possible to follow the reasoning and steps taken by T6, but it wasn't obvious to me. I'm not sure that we will convince each other that "my Vic-20" is better than your "ZX80" but I do enjoy the debate. What has alarmed me on this board, however, is the perception that anything other than T6 should be "disallowed" or "not supported". Timetabler is a Capita partner and their product is equivalent to T6. It dumps the entire timetable into SIMS.net and from there the timetable can be accessed across the school just like a timetable from T6. As a timetabler, I want to choose the tools that I use in my work, just like as a Head of Department I choose the textbooks and equipment used in my department. By the way my full solution is what I consider the minimum information needed to recreate the entire timetable with no further calculation or appendices. It is a big table with 40 periods along the top and 91 teachers down the side. In each of the 3640 boxes I print the teaching group, subject and room. In 8-point font, this fits on four landscape A3 sheets. It can reduce onto A4 but in middle age I find my arms are getting shorter than they used to be. Anyhow teaching is beckoning on Monday. I obviously have too much time to post messages as long as this. David Hayton King Henry VIII School, Coventry

Thanks Matt! I am a genuine timetabler in a genuine school (that's why I'm happy to give my school name), and I have no connection with Keith Johnson apart from the fact that I bought his software. As a timetabler I appreciate the way in which I am allowed to choose the tools that I need in order to do my job. Timetabling isn't an admin task, it is an intellectual activity that involves finding the best solution to a huge number of simultaneous equations. Once it is all solved, I can get the whole solution onto four sides of A3. I would still use Timetabler even if I then had to type this 4-page solution into T6 because Timetabler allows me to build the timetable in exactly the same way as I would do it manually on a pin-board. I make all the decisions. Timetabler merely prioritises the activities, helps me out when activities won't fit, and keeps me from making any mistakes. Colleagues do query the timetable (no solution can ever please everybody all of the time), but I have always been able to explain the reason why things were as they were. My impression of T6 is that more goes on behind the scenes. However, as I said in an earlier posting my experience of T6 is limited because when I wanted to use it, nobody could tell me how I could encode what was a fiendishly complicated curriculum plan into T6. The plan is now simpler but I still go nowhere near T6 because Timetabler uses the same import wizard into SIMS.net, so it would be a pointless activity typing everything into T6. David Hayton King Henry VIII School, Coventry

No you don't have to assign teachers to subjects before you start scheduling with Timetabler. You can assign subjects to an activity at any stage during the timetabling process. Timetabler does the rooming very well. When editing the rooming at the end of the process it has a very powerful drag-and-drop facility that can move activities between rooms quickly and intuitively. Timetabler integrates with SIMS. net in exactly the same way as T6 does - it uses the same import wizard. David Hayton King Henry VIII School, Coventry

Because, from a timetabling perspective (I'm a school timetabler, not a systems manager), I find Timetabler to be far superior. The way in which it prioritises activities during scheduling, and searches for solutions when they don't appear to fit at all is astonishing. When I've finished scheduling it transfers the timetable into SIMS.net in just the same way as T6. From there on we use SIMS to print timetables, arrange cover, etc, etc. David Hayton King Henry VIII School, Coventry

I have been reading these posts with interest. I am the timetabler in an independent secondary school with a rather complicated curriculum plan. My principal requirement in a timetable package is that it does what I want it to do in the way that I want it done, and it lets me stay in control at all times. Keith Johnson's Timetabler does just that, and does it elegantly and intuitively. I really wouldn't use anything else. I was appointed timetabler three years ago at the time when my school was moving from Phoenix to SIMS.net. Naturally I considered T6, and took advantage of four days of training. However it was clear that T6 found our curriculum plan difficult to encode. Three different people told me that it must be possible to encode the plan (the Capita rep amongst them) but nobody could come up with a solution. Meanwhile Timetabler coped easily. I encoded all the data into Timetabler myself, and needed no training apart from reading the manual. I have now used Timetabler to produce three timetables. All were produced on time and the feedback from colleagues was positive and encouraging each time. The import into SIMS did run into a couple of problems in 2007 but the Timetabler helpline at the time was superb, and they improved the import file in 2008 and again in 2009. David Hayton King Henry VIII School, Coventry