When it comes to creating a timetable, ensuring that you have the right option blocks/election lines is key. These are, after all, the foundations of the schedule that you’re building and the pathways that you are offering to your students.
Getting these right at the outset means you have a much better chance of creating a smooth-running school, where rooms and staff are assigned in an intelligent and effective way, with fewer shared classes and better allocation of resources, all likely leading to better outcomes for students.
What’s more, this approach has been shown to have a powerful impact on student satisfaction, enabling more young people to pursue the subjects they are passionate about, which is likely to improve their chances of being happy and successful in their studies.
So how can you create the right ones for your school?
Tes Timetable, our intelligent timetabling software (powered by Edval), can help. Through its unique and innovative algorithms, it can consider up to 30,000 timetables per second, allowing you to prioritise teacher and student choices.
Tes Timetable's online student portal enables you to improve the process of generating elective lines/option blocks and allow more students to study their top elective choices, by:
1. Capturing main preferences plus reserve choices for greater choice.
2. Eliminating messy paper forms and time-consuming data entry.
3. Providing an easy-to-use, secure online portal, making capturing student selections simple, efficient, and safe.
4. Saving you time by ensuring students select the correct number and type of subjects.
5. Ensuring you have staff available to teach courses by having visibility of the elective lines running above each year's level.
'Maximising efficiency in student choice'
Jo Matherson is deputy principal at Somerville House in Brisbane, Australia and says the software had a transformative impact on the school, and the options they were able to offer to their students.
"When doing student choices, Tes Timetable really helped: to be able to look at those lines we were running above each of the year levels and to make sure we had staff available to teach the classes, as well as maximising the efficiency in student choice,” she explains.
“This year was really successful thanks to the software; all students in Years 11, 9 and 8 were able to get their top six elective choices and we only had 10 students across the senior school who had to fall into their reserve preference."
Tes Timetable’s intelligent algorithms mean you can ensure the highest levels of student satisfaction and engagement while also balancing class sizes and optimising flexible working patterns for teachers. The combined effect of greater staff consistency during the school cycle and the flexibility to explore more creative curriculum plans drives up student achievement.