School timetable

A school timetable is a table for coordinating these four elements:

Other factors include the subject of the class, and the type of classrooms available (for example, science laboratories).

School timetables usually cycle every week or every fortnight. The phrase "school timetables" largely refers to high schools, because primary schools typically have simple structures.

High school timetables are quite different from university timetables. The main difference is that in high schools, students have to be occupied and supervised every hour of the school day, or nearly every hour. Also, high school teachers generally have much higher teaching loads than is the case in universities. As a result, it is generally considered that university timetables involve more human judgement whereas high school timetabling is a more computationally intensive task, see constraint satisfaction problem.

Primary school typically has timetables, however the timetable is usually so simple that it can be constructed manually or in a basic spreadsheet package.

In some countries and regions, such as China and East Africa, high school students are not given any choice in subjects, and this makes timetabling easy - the students can remain in the one room all day while the teachers rotate.

In other countries, such as United States, the whole school is typically run on a system of units, where each subject has the same number of lessons per cycle and subjects are placed into 'lines'. This also makes timetabling easy.

In countries, such as Australia, Canada, and most European countries, there generally exists a combination of the variants above, and timetables can be extremely difficult to construct. The process can take weeks of effort and typically computers are needed in the process.

The task of constructing a high school timetable involves the following issues (not an exhaustive list):

A central issue which exists both in the American model (all lessons in all year-levels are organised into lines) and the European model (containing all the complexities listed above) is to provide an individualised curriculum for each student that provides for his/her strengths, weaknesses and personal preferences. Certain subjects lend themselves to setting, or organising students into ability groups. Mathematics is a good example, where some students in the same age range may be years ahead of their peers. There are other subjects where students benefit from placement in mixed ability groups. This is an ongoing debate amongst teachers.

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