Enter your teachers, subjects, classes, and any constraints. The algorithm handles the rest — including daily substitution assignments when someone calls in sick.
Timetable Generation
Most school coordinators build timetables the same way: a large grid on paper or Excel, shifting teachers around by hand until the clashes stop. The moment one thing changes — a part-time teacher joins, a lab gets booked for a week — the whole grid has to be redone.
SchoolDeck's scheduling algorithm takes your inputs — teachers, subjects, rooms, periods per week — and works out a valid, conflict-free arrangement automatically. You review and publish. That's the whole process.
Daily Substitutions
When a teacher calls in sick, the VP or coordinator currently has to cross-reference three things mentally: who is free that period, who teaches that subject, and who hasn't already been burdened with three covers this week. That's usually done by memory, under pressure, before first bell.
SchoolDeck does this automatically. The moment a teacher is marked absent in the attendance module, the substitution engine identifies every affected period and suggests the best available cover teacher for each one.
A medium-sized school with 40 teachers, 20 classes, and 8 periods a day has millions of possible schedule combinations. Most are invalid — a teacher double-booked, a lab over-allocated, a class left without a period of a compulsory subject. Finding the valid combinations by hand is not just tedious, it's a combinatorial problem that humans aren't built to solve reliably.
The typical approach is: start with a blank Excel grid, place the hardest constraints first (the part-time Music teacher who comes in only on Tuesdays, the Computer Lab shared by four sections), and then fill in the rest. Every edit has cascading effects. Move one class and you need to check five other rows. Schools spend two to three weeks on this every academic year — and still end up with conflicts that surface only after the timetable is published.
The issue isn't effort. It's that the problem is too large for manual methods to solve well, especially when you add soft constraints like "don't schedule the same subject twice in a day for the same class" or "give Mrs. Menon a free period before her Grade 12 board revision class."
The generator uses a heuristic scheduling algorithm — the same class of method used in airline crew scheduling and university exam timetabling. It doesn't try all possible combinations (that would take days for a large school). Instead, it prioritises the hardest constraints first.
The algorithm starts by placing inflexible blocks into the schedule: part-time teachers with fixed availability, labs that can only handle one class at a time, subjects that require double periods for practicals. Once those are fixed, the remaining periods are filled around them. At each step, the algorithm checks for conflicts and backtracks if it hits one, trying a different placement. When it's done, every slot is filled and every constraint is satisfied.
What this looks like in practice: You enter your data on a Monday morning. By lunchtime, a valid timetable is ready for the VP to review. Any manual tweaks you want to make can be done by dragging periods — the system checks for conflicts in real time and flags any new ones instantly.
Not all scheduling rules carry equal weight. SchoolDeck separates them into two types, which is what allows the algorithm to find a solution even when perfect is impossible.
These are absolute. The algorithm will not generate a schedule that violates any of these:
These improve the quality of the timetable but can be relaxed if satisfying all hard constraints requires it:
CBSE and ICSE both specify maximum weekly teaching hours for faculty. Schools that exceed these limits — even unintentionally — create compliance issues during inspections. Manual tracking with Excel makes it easy to miss, especially when mid-year changes are made.
SchoolDeck includes a visual workload heatmap for every teacher. Green means under-utilised. Yellow means within norms. Red means over the limit. Any teacher showing red flags the compliance issue before the timetable is published, not after.
The heatmap also helps spot inequity — one teacher taking 32 periods a week while another takes 18 in the same department. Before SchoolDeck, this kind of imbalance often went unnoticed until a teacher complaint surfaced it.
In most schools, the bottleneck isn't teachers — it's rooms. The Chemistry Lab can only handle one batch at a time. The Computer Room has 30 machines for a school with six sections of 45 each. The Auditorium books up for assemblies, PT rehearsals, and parent meetings.
SchoolDeck treats rooms as resources with their own availability, capacity, and equipment type. The algorithm schedules room use alongside teacher and class placement — so the Computer Room is never double-booked, and Chemistry never lands in a room without a fume hood.
For practicals that need two consecutive periods — Biology dissections, Physics experiments — the system automatically allocates double slots rather than scheduling them as two separate single periods that could end up non-consecutive.
A timetable can be perfectly conflict-free from an administrative point of view and still be a bad learning experience. A Class 12 student who has Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry all in the same morning — followed by a PE session — will be cognitively depleted by Period 5.
Academic directors can configure subject distribution rules that spread demanding subjects across the week. No student gets three back-to-back "heavy" subjects in the same morning unless it's unavoidable. Lighter subjects — Art, Music, Physical Education — are used as cognitive breaks between intensive periods.
These aren't just pedagogical preferences. Schools that implement balanced schedules typically report better student attention in afternoon periods and fewer complaints from class teachers about student engagement.
A standalone timetable app is useful. A timetable that's the backbone of your entire school ERP is transformative. In SchoolDeck, the master timetable isn't a separate document — it's a live data source that other modules read from automatically.
For a school with 30 teachers, 15 classes, and a standard 8-period day.
| Task | Pen & Whiteboard | Excel | SchoolDeck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to build timetable | 2–3 weeks | 1–2 weeks | Under 5 minutes |
| Conflict detection | Manual — high error rate | Basic formula alerts | 100% automated, real-time |
| Teacher workload compliance | Tracked separately, often missed | Manual count per row | Visual heatmap, flags before publish |
| Daily substitutions | Morning panic, done by memory | Manual cross-reference | Automatic suggestion + mobile alert |
| Distributing timetable to staff | Printed and pinned to board | Email attachment | Live in mobile app, updates instantly |
| Mid-year changes | Rebuild from scratch | Manual re-check of all affected rows | Drag to change, auto conflict check |
Questions school coordinators ask before switching from Excel.
Once your data is entered — teachers, subjects, classes, rooms, and constraints — the algorithm typically generates a complete timetable in under 5 minutes for a school with up to 60 teachers and 30 classes. The data entry itself takes a few hours the first time. After that, each new academic year takes about an hour to update.
If your constraints are mathematically impossible — for example, assigning a teacher more periods than the week has available slots — the Conflict Analyzer pinpoints the exact bottleneck and tells you which constraint to relax. It won't just fail with a generic error. Schools often discover they've been overloading teachers without realising it until this step.
Yes. You can save multiple versions — Winter Schedule, Summer Schedule, Exam Week, Sports Day Week — and switch between them with one click. Each version is fully independent, so activating the summer schedule doesn't overwrite the winter one.
Yes. You can configure a standard 5-day week, a 6-day week with a shorter Saturday, or an alternating Week A / Week B structure used by IB and Cambridge schools. Period duration can vary by day — Saturday short periods are handled correctly.
Once the principal approves and publishes the timetable, it goes live in the SchoolDeck staff app and parent app immediately. No email, no printed copy needed. Any subsequent changes — including temporary substitutions — update in the app in real time.
Yes. Teacher availability and preferences are set as soft constraints. If a teacher has a long commute on Mondays and prefers not to be assigned Period 1, the algorithm will try to honour that. If it's mathematically impossible to satisfy while meeting all hard constraints, it will assign Period 1 but flag the preference conflict for the coordinator to review.
The timetable feeds into these modules automatically — no double data entry.
Teachers see exactly how many periods they have per subject. Syllabus mapping happens against real scheduled slots.
Zoom or Meet links auto-generated per period based on that day's timetable. Teachers don't create meetings manually.
When a teacher is marked absent, the substitution engine activates automatically based on that day's timetable.
In the demo, we'll enter your real class and teacher count and run the algorithm live — so you see how long it actually takes and what the output looks like before committing to anything.
No commitment. Setup for a typical school takes one afternoon.
