As a result of the recent announcement on school closures, schools are now faced with the task of quickly putting together a plan for the next few weeks. While we know that 6th years will have to attend school for part of the week, there isn’t specific guidance for all schools to follow regarding timetabling, so it will be up to each school to decide what approach is best for them.
From a timetabling perspective, the obvious and least disruptive path to take is to leave your 6th year timetable as it is and simply ask the 6th years to only come in on certain days.
This will mean that you won’t have to worry about creating a temporary file which has its own limitations and risks, or teacher clashes that are almost guaranteed to occur if you do create a separate file. If you leave your timetable as it is, you simply need to decide on which days are best for the students to attend and which are best for them to stay at home.
If you do decide to go down a different route of creating a temporary timetable for the 6th years consisting of just 3 days, please be aware that you will not be able to publish this file.
While there is no issue with creating a new file in timetable construction, publishing that new file will have serious implications for your attendance data, class lists and other associated information. For this reason, the option to publish for schools has been temporarily turned off so that a loss of important data is avoided. This feature will be available again at the end of January.
Another drawback is that teachers would not be able to take individual teaching group attendance while a temporary 6th year timetable is in place. If you would like to find out more about this second option, please contact support who can give you more information.
As we know, these are very unusual times and we are working with the latest information available. This could of course change at any time so we will work with schools throughout the month to help you get through this challenging time with the least impact
