How it works

From an empty term to a published week.

Five steps, in the order the work actually happens. Nothing here is hidden configuration: each step changes data you can inspect and correct.

1

Set up the institution

Start with the frame the timetable lives in. An institution owns its own time zone and teaching days, and holds the academic years and terms that lessons belong to.

  • Institution name, time zone and the days it teaches.
  • Academic years, each containing terms that cannot overlap.
  • One timetable per term and class, so a published week always has a home.
Institution Example
Time zoneSchool-local
Teaching daysMonday – Friday
Academic year2026 / 2027
TermsTerm 1, Term 2, Term 3

2

Capture what is taught

Describe the groups that learn, the people who teach and the spaces they need. A weekly requirement is then attached to a class and a subject, with the teacher assignment that makes it real.

  • Subjects with a code, a colour and an active state.
  • Classes and streams, grouped under parent cohorts where needed.
  • Teachers and their teaching assignments.
  • Programmes, activity types and class kinds for non-school institutions.
Activities Example
Weekly requirements
Mathematics · Grade 9A3 lessons
Chemistry · Grade 9A1 double session
English · Grade 9A2 lessons
Teachers
Mathematics Chemistry English

3

Describe the teaching day

Periods and breaks define where a lesson is allowed to sit. Because they are ordinary records, a teaching day can be as short or as unusual as the institution actually needs.

  • Periods from 5 to 600 minutes.
  • Breaks that no lesson may overlap.
  • Reserved time for clinical practice, examinations or laboratory days.
  • Wall-clock ordering, so the grid always reads in real time.
Periods and breaks Example
08:00 – 08:45Lesson
08:45 – 09:30Lesson
09:30 – 10:15Lesson
10:15 – 10:45Break
10:45 – 11:30Lesson
No lesson may be placed inside a break.

4

Generate the week

The engine places every required session while honouring the rules that cannot be broken. Multi-period sessions are placed as one unit, and a run either produces a complete week or explains why it cannot.

  • Deterministic results for identical inputs and configuration.
  • Teacher, class and room availability respected simultaneously.
  • Blocking diagnostics instead of a half-built timetable.
  • Soft preferences optimised only after every hard rule holds.
Generation Example
Required sessions22
Placed22
Conflicts0
Warnings0
Week generated in full; nothing left unplaced.

5

Review and publish

Read the week as a teacher would: one class, one term, five days in order. When it is right, publish. When something changes, unpublish first — the lock is enforced by the database.

  • Weekly grid per class and term.
  • Published lessons become read-only until the term is unpublished.
  • Regeneration is refused while a term is published.
  • Teachers and viewers read the published week without changing institution data.
Publication state Example
Term 2 · Grade 9Draft
Lessons ready22
Ready to publish.
After publishing, edits require unpublishing the term.
Infeasibility

When a week cannot be built, you are told why.

A scheduler that always produces something is a scheduler you cannot trust. AnySchedule reports an impossible week as an impossible week.

Nothing is invented

Lessons are never shortened, dropped or moved to a day that does not exist just to fill the grid. A partial week is not presented as a finished one.

The reason is specific

Diagnostics point at the requirement that could not be satisfied, such as a missing room or an exhausted weekly requirement, so the fix is a data change rather than a guess.

A result, not a crash

Infeasibility is a typed outcome the interface can display, not an error the user has to interpret from logs.

Roles

Access follows the institution.

Membership of an institution carries a role. Administration is explicit, and read access is never the same as write access.

Administrator

Maintains institution data: terms, subjects, classes, teachers, rooms, periods and reservations. Generates and publishes timetables.

Teacher

A member of the institution who appears on teaching assignments, with access limited to the institution they belong to.

Viewer

Reads the institution’s timetable without administrative rights over its data.

Now see where the data goes.

The privacy policy explains exactly what AnySchedule stores, where it lives, and how an account and its data are deleted.