How it works

How to build a school timetable

The same three steps whether you do it on paper or with Schedula — and the reason each of them eats a summer. Below them, every part of the product, explained.

Get my school set upWe set it up with you — nothing to install

Get the school into one place

Year groups, classes, subjects, weekly hours per subject per year group, rooms and what each one suits, teachers and what each is qualified to teach.

This is where the summer starts going. Every year group, class, subject, room and teacher has to be entered once before a single lesson can be placed.
The number that matters most is curriculum hours: how many weekly lessons each subject owes each year group.
Rooms are a rule, not a detail. A chemistry lesson that can only sit in one lab is far harder to place than one that fits anywhere.
With Schedula you type it as ordinary sentences, or hand over the spreadsheet you already keep, and approve what it understood.

Collect what the staff cannot do — and what they would like

What is impossible first (the day someone studies, the afternoon someone works elsewhere), then what they would prefer.

Every teacher has their own personal requests, and no two people ask for the same thing. On paper that is a hundred-odd notes to read, weigh against each other and place by hand.
Keep the two apart. A day someone cannot work is a rule; a preference is a wish. Mixing them is the most common reason a timetable comes back impossible — and the most common reason the impossible ones get deleted until something comes out.
Ask every teacher the same question in the same format, or you cannot compare answers fairly, and "as much as possible" quietly becomes "whoever asked first".
Schedula sends each teacher a private link: they rate every hour of the week, ask for a day off, and add anything else in their own words.

Build it, read it, publish it

Produce the week, read it in the views that expose problems, adjust by hand, then share it.

This is where most tools stop being useful. Give one everything your school needs and it stalls; give it less and it hands back a week with hours nobody teaches and two lessons in the same room.
Read a new timetable year group by year group first — free hours stranded mid-day, and classes that start late, show up there before anything else.
Then read it teacher by teacher, which is where the fairness complaints come from.
Schedula builds the week, flags every trade-off it had to make, and lets you move lessons afterwards with the rules still enforced.

Schedula

Every part, in detail

Every part of the product, with the reasoning written out underneath each piece.

Getting your school in

Describe it in plain sentences

Say what your grades, classes, subjects, curriculum hours and rooms are, in ordinary language or Hebrew. Schedula turns it into records and shows you the preview before anything is written. Drop your existing spreadsheet or roster on any step and it reads that instead.

Staff sign-up link

One link adds every teacher to your school with their subjects, their hours, the days they cannot work and their requests already attached. No spreadsheet, no accounts to create by hand.

Checked before it builds

Schedula reads your numbers first and names what cannot possibly work — a teacher owing more hours than the week holds, a subject with no room that fits — and offers the fix in place. It reports only what is genuinely impossible, never what is merely tight.

Building the week

Every rule on the list, kept together

The days a teacher cannot work, rooms that suit only one subject, exactly the hours the curriculum owes, subjects a whole year group takes at the same time, the hour a year group splits into level groups. Every rule listed below is held at once, and a week comes back only if all of them hold.

The students come first, by default

Free hours stranded in the middle of a class’s day are cut first, to the fewest Schedula can find, and locked. Then classes that start late. Only after both are locked does Schedula read a single teacher request, so a teacher’s request is never granted at the cost of a class’s free hour. That is the default order, and your school can change it.

An even split, not the biggest total

Schedula strives to give every teacher the same proportion of what they asked for, rather than granting the most requests overall. It lifts whoever is doing worst rather than adding to whoever is already doing well.

Living with it

Seven views of one timetable

The whole school at once, a full week, one class, a year group on one day, every teacher, staff meetings, and a list of the day: the same timetable, seven ways to read it, and you can edit from each.

Move a lesson, see what it costs

Pick up any lesson and the week colours itself: the slots where nothing else has to move, the slots that shift two or three other lessons, and the slots that would break a rule. Level-group blocks move as one piece, so a split never half-moves.

Undo, redo, history

A full timeline of every edit in a session, reversible to any point, with unsaved changes clearly flagged.

Shared access with roles

Admin, editor and viewer. Invite by email or link, revoke at any time. The timetable stops living in one person’s head, which matters most in the year they leave.

Seven ways out

PDF, print, Excel, PNG, CSV, a calendar file or a web page — and each one states what it costs you before you pick it, because a timetable is printed once and then lives on a wall for a year.

Absences and cover

Mark a teacher out and the board lists every lesson they had that day, with the colleagues who can take each one, lightest-loaded first. The cover applies to that date only.

The rules Schedula keeps

All of them hold at once, and a week comes back only if every one of them does.

People and rooms

No teacher, no room and no student is booked into two lessons at the same hour.
Nobody teaches at an hour or on a day they cannot work.
No teacher works more days a week than you set.
Each teacher teaches only the subjects and classes you assign them, and a homeroom subject is taught by each class’s own homeroom teacher.
A lesson that needs a lab, a gym or a computer room goes only where one is free.

Hours and subjects

Every subject gets exactly the weekly hours the curriculum gives it.
A class has the same teacher for a subject in every lesson of the week.
Subjects a whole year group takes together happen at the same hour in every class.
Level groups and majors split the year group at one hour, each group with its own teacher.
No subject is taught more than four times in one day.
Subjects with four or more hours a week get double periods, as many as the week allows.

Fixed points in the day

Every class has at least the number of lessons a day you set, unless you exempt that day.
A lesson you fix to a day and an hour stays there.
Classes you group together finish the day at the same hour.
A staff meeting at an hour you set keeps that hour free of lessons. One you leave to Schedula goes where every member is free, or you are told it could not fit.
A second teacher can join a class’s lesson for as many hours a week as you set, at hours you choose or hours Schedula picks.

Questions schools ask

Will I still place half of it by hand?

No. Every rule you enter goes into the build. Afterwards you move whatever you disagree with, and the rules are re-checked before the lesson lands.

My school’s rules are more specific than any software.

Every rule Schedula keeps is listed on the How it works page. If yours is not there, tell us. That is how the list grew.

What if my numbers don’t allow a valid week at all?

You find out before you start. Schedula names what is impossible — which class, which teacher, which hour — with the fix beside it.

What happens to the requests I collect in March?

They stop being paper. Each teacher fills in their own week from a private link, and you get a percentage per teacher you can show them.

Does it work in Hebrew?

Hebrew and English throughout, right to left included. Each teacher gets the form in their own language.

Is this the same as other products called Schedula?

No. This Schedula is the school timetable software from Israel, at schedula.school. Other products that share the name are not connected to us.

What does it cost?

Tell us the size of your school and we will come back with a number. Nothing to install either way.

Stop spending your summer on this.

Get my school set up

Tell us about your school and we take it from there