Secondary school timetabling has often been a solitary pursuit: a lone expert locking themselves away for weeks at a time, poring over fiendish formulae and arcane terminology in an attempt to magic up a workable schedule for everyone, like an alchemist muttering over a cauldron in some fantasy saga.

Some might say “no wonder”: a timetabler (usually a depute head) knows that they will never keep everyone happy and their work has, in many ways, become ever more complex over the years.

They are faced with clashing priorities, a baffling lexicon - carousels, disjoints, fit points, schematics - and the knowledge that every person in school is waiting with bated breath for this masterwork of scheduling. The reflex response of other staff has often been to shuffle away and let The Timetabler get on with it.

That cannot be the case any more, says Grant Whytock.

The former secondary head is one of the foremost timetabling experts in Scotland, running courses for the University of Edinburgh that help school staff at home and abroad to get their heads around principles of effective timetabling.

Whytock says school timetabling has not traditionally got the attention it deserves, in education research papers, in policy debates about education - and in schools themselves.

“I just think it’s undervalued,” he says, adding: “It’s always had this mystique around it, where there’s one expert in the school who manages this…and it’s only really an issue if it doesn’t work.”

This is baffling to Whytock, who says that if you think of a school as being like a car, then the timetable is the engine that propels it forward - or splutters to a halt.

‘Like three-dimensional chess’

Yet he finds that a lot of senior school leaders “don’t want to get their hands dirty, to get involved in putting together all the bits and creating the engine”. The fact that timetabling has in many cases not been discussed at any length in courses for aspiring headteachers is, in his view, “crazy”.

“Everybody who has a management role in school should know how it’s put together and functions, and what the constraints are within the system - because if they understand that, then it’s going to make managing the curriculum and difficult decisions much easier,” Whytock explains.

And the importance of this may be greater than ever before, because timetables now have more ground to cover than ever.

The traditional monolithic timetables, with a rigid handful of columns, have not yet been ditched en masse, but their limitations are being exposed as schools expand their offerings to students, with ongoing qualifications and assessment reform only likely to hasten their demise.

Since the advent of Curriculum for Excellence - and subsequent pushes to multiply secondary schools’ “learning pathways” - timetabling has become even harder. Glasgow education director Douglas Hutchison, who has just finished his term as president of education directors’ body ADES, told me this month that timetabling was like “three-dimensional chess”.

‘If you really want young people to attain well, allow them to choose what they study’

Consider just some of the newer priorities for Scottish secondary schools: National Progression Awards, Foundation Apprenticeships, closer working with further education colleges, consortia arrangements with other schools, greater emphasis on schemes such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

Then throw in some schools’ determination to establish a fluid senior phase from S4-6 - rather than treating each year as a discrete entity - and the conundrum of how on earth you juggle seven-subject models at National 5 with the five-Higher model that has long dominated S5.

If all that wasn’t bamboozling enough, add in teacher recruitment crises and shrinking budgets.

“Compare that with what it used to be like 20 years ago - it’s significantly more complex and difficult now,” says Whytock, surveying the task that lies before timetablers.

Prioritising curriculum

Amid that complexity, establishing key principles seems crucial, and for Hutchison, this is far more straightforward.

He believes that the timetable should not dictate what students can or can’t do. Instead, the starting point should be establishing what students want to learn.

“For me, the curriculum takes priority and it’s the timetabler’s job to deliver on that,” says Hutchison. “I don’t think a school should be led by the timetabler; I think it should be led by the curriculum makers.”

He adds: “The problem was that we just chucked kids in these columns and hoped that they would stick.

“We should be thinking much more about what pathways these young people need to get them into positive destinations and not trying to stick them into the traditional column structure.”

Hutchison accepts, however, that it will not always be possible to create every student’s dream timetable.

“If the timetabler says, ‘It cannae be done, captain,’ then at that point you have a discussion about what’s actually deliverable within the constraints of the timetable.”

Financial benefits

Whytock says many schools are still “shying away” from shaking up timetables, that it remains tricky even with improving computer software. More school staff should be trained in timetabling, he believes, as research suggests that more varied timetables boost attainment.

“If you really want young people to attain well, allow them to choose what they study. Give them a free choice,” he says.

There is also a financial argument for better timetabling, explains Whytock.

A school of 1,000-plus students costs the public purse several million pounds a year, about three-quarters of which is spent on staffing. Even a slightly improved timetable, which uses a particular teacher’s skills better, could free up money.

“You can buy a lot of textbooks for £20,000,” says Whytock.

Saving time for teachers and school leaders could, of course, also work wonders for staff wellbeing and retention. There is growing demand for flexible working, and looser timetables could make that more achievable.

There remain concerns, however, that timetables are still too often constricting staff and students rather than liberating them.

CfE has, in theory, opened up myriad new possibilities in secondary schools and chipped away at the pedestal that put academic study above vocational courses; in practice, school timetables in the S4-6 senior phase often look much as they did decades ago, with the amassing of five Highers prioritised regardless of fine words about “parity” and “wider achievement”.

Just two weeks ago, in one of his last acts as School Leaders Scotland president, Peter Bain spoke in the Scottish Parliament about how schools decide on the number and range of subjects they offer.

“The timetable is the biggest constraint on the number of qualifications that any school can deliver,” he said. The school timetable, “more than anything”, decides how much choice students have, Bain added.

The beginnings of change

However, change is happening, as was made clear by a report on timetabling published by Education Scotland on 31 October.

Realising Parity in the Senior Phase: learner pathways is the first of a series of briefing papers from the National Timetabling Group, with future topics - in papers likely to be published in 2024 and 2025 - including teacher non-contact time, interdisciplinary learning and implementing the Hayward report’s proposals.

The timetabling group draws on expertise from schools, local authorities and RICs (regional improvement collaboratives) across Scotland, as far apart as Charleston Academy (Inverness), Lockerbie Academy, Oban High School and Fraserburgh Academy.

The group’s first paper underlines that prevailing education policy in Scotland - with vocational and work-based opportunities in secondary school more prominent than ever - has “highlighted the need for further professional learning and support for timetabling and curriculum design”.

Timetabling must adapt, it advises, when some schools have already “moved away from a perception of the senior phase as a predominantly school-based option, to one where learning can take place in school, at college, in the workplace, at university or online”.

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A richer timetable could, it finds, yield “significant benefits for learners and schools”.

Not only is “a much wider curriculum…meeting the needs and aspirations of a larger number of learners” but it inches Scottish education policy closer to its holy grail: there is “emerging evidence that this can have a significant impact on closing the poverty-related attainment gap”.

Of course, the more you try to weave into the school timetable, the more complex it becomes.

One solution is “alignment of timetables and the school day across an authority (or cluster of schools)”, bringing together students from several schools and potentially freeing up staff, who might then have time to “widen the curriculum offer” even further.

By aligning timetables effectively, schools are “creating an infrastructure” that will allow them to take full advantage of college-based programmes and qualifications such as Foundation Apprenticeships.

Practical difficulties

On the downside, standardisation can feel stifling. The timetabling group “felt strongly” that every school “should have the capacity to innovate to meet their individual contexts and there were some risks that this could be constrained by standardisation across a local authority”.

There are also some clear “practical difficulties”, with the structures of vocational qualifications not necessarily fitting seamlessly into school life.

The timetabling group’s report contains school case studies, including Brechin High, in Angus. Its curriculum is now “based on a ‘free choice’ model with columns created by student choice rather than columns dictating choices available to students”. This “provides enhanced progression pathways with strong links to the local labour market”.

School and college staff work closely on timetabling. Brechin High students can, for example, take a level 4 construction skills and automotive Foundation Apprenticeship, now “delivered by technical teachers as part of the school curriculum”, while level 5 construction skills is done at Dundee and Angus College.

At Dundee’s Grove Academy, the intertwining of school and college timetables has driven innovative approaches to teaching. Since 2016-17, the school has moved away from a “traditional senior phase model”, where college courses were more of a bolt-on rather than part of the main timetable.

Placements are now “fully integrated into students’ timetables”, for example, so that they do not have to be pulled out of other classes.

Project-based programmes are “co-designed and co-delivered” with colleges and employers, allowing the school to painlessly incorporate, for example, placements with Apex Hotels - a big employer in Dundee - and to run an S4 plumbing and electrical programme.

‘A good timetable is one that’s wide and open’

And with school funding very tight, the following statement in the paper will attract headteachers’ attention: “The increasing collaboration between the school and a range of partners enabled a significant expansion of the curriculum at a time of local authority budget and staffing cuts.”

Grove Academy has been “moving away from an emphasis on [individual] courses” in favour of “a greater focus on pathways and longer-term planning”.

There is now “no separate application process for college-based options”; this echoes Grove’s “wider messaging that the senior phase…could naturally happen in school, at college, in the workplace, online or at university”.

The Grove Academy timetable, then, is more than simply functional. The changing nature of the timetable also symbolises a fundamental shift in how the school sees its purpose: it is determined to work equally for all students, regardless of their future aspirations.

A common complaint in Scottish education is that the long-established demands of the senior phase tamp down innovation in the S1-3 “broad general education” (BGE), as if the senior phase takes an attitude of “very nice, thanks for your efforts, but we need to get our heads down now - our kids are the most examined in the world, don’t you know?”

University of Stirling research for the Nuffield Foundation, published in March, found that exam-related pressure was causing “countereducational” practices, including the scrapping of “low-performing subjects”, “teaching to the test” and the “channelling [of] students into courses to benefit school attainment statistics”.

Getting teachers off ‘conveyor belts’

But what if you could flip that around? What if, rather than the senior phase dictating to the BGE, the BGE was setting the standard that shaped the senior phase?

At one of Scotland’s newest secondary schools, the BGE timetable will have more influence over the senior phase - because, in a practical sense, there is no senior phase yet.

Winchburgh Academy opened in August 2022 and, despite a capacity of 660, has just 110 students for now, split evenly across S1 and S2, in a West Lothian former shale-mining community where the population is expected to mushroom from under 4,000 to around 14,000 in the years ahead.

Headteacher Jonny Mitchell generated a lot of interest at a September curriculum conference held at Lornshill Academy, in Clackmannanshire, with a presentation on his school’s approach to timetabling.

Teachers don’t like a “conveyor belt of 50 minutes, 50 minutes, 50 minutes”, he tells me. The school prefers longer periods of 100 minutes, which it describes as “learning workshops”: from 8.50am-10.30am, 10.45am-12.25pm, then a shorter “power-up” workshop from 1.10pm-2pm (taking account of post-lunch slumps), and from 2pm-3.40pm.

Mitchell sees myriad benefits.

“It’s more difficult to be creative in 50 minutes,” he says, with longer sessions allowing more collaborative learning across subjects in the largely open-plan school. Project-based approaches, work experience and outdoor learning are all easier to do when there is more time to play with, explains Mitchell.

Finding the joy

But it was the school’s approach to Fridays that got the most interest.

At Winchburgh Academy - as has been the case for many years in Edinburgh and local authorities around it - students have Friday afternoon off. But Mitchell is determined that no one coasts through the short Fridays: “We want people to get to the end of the week and they just love being there, can’t wait to get in there.”

“My Academy” is the school’s branding for Fridays: students focus on the passions and skills that fire them up, with the eclectic options including animal care, golf, “masterchef” and science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem).

The Monday to Thursday timetable is set aside on a Friday, when S1s choose three areas in 10-week blocks; S2s drop one and do two 15-week blocks.

Mitchell is not in denial about the exam-driven realities of the senior phase as it is just now, and accepts that some of the urge to shake up traditional timetabling will have to be reined in as the school adds a new year group each year (Winchburgh will have students in all six year groups only from 2027-28).

However, he insists that timetabling at each stage will be driven by the determination to help students “find the joy in learning” and ensure that they “love coming to school”.

Breaking down barriers

There are a couple of key principles that Whytock, the timetabling expert and former secondary head, keeps coming back to.

First: “A good timetable is one that’s wide and open.”

Second: if people who work in or with a school “don’t understand how the timetable works, how can they get involved in making it better?”

For Mitchell, back at Winchburgh Academy, timetables have too often acted as “barriers” that determine “what you do or what you don’t do” in classes - but also as “barriers to change in [teaching] culture”.

He believes that the timetable must “meet learners’ needs”, and to do so it will have to adapt every year, even as students enter the senior phase.

“I think that we need to provide for everybody - and that will be the driver for our timetabling,” he says.

Henry Hepburn is Scotland editor at Tes