E10 - Analyse staffing needs before construction

Modified on Thu, 14 Aug at 1:07 AM

Preamble

It is NOT necessary to build your timetable to be sure that you have enough staff for the following year.

Staffing needs are identified as part of the CTRL-Q checks that are required to reach the champagne stage, which is recommended prior to constructing the timetable in the Master grid.

Go to Teachers > Staff allocations (F4) > Action bar: Auto staff classes (sample staffing) CTRL-L. Going through this process will use the information in your Subject teacher sets (SHIFT-F2) and the TPref column in Class data (F6) to staff all of the classes in your file. We highly recommend doing this for all rotations at once.

Find the full Auto staff process in the document E10 - How to: Auto staff / Sample staff classes

Once the sample staffing has been done you can look at each faculty individually to determine whether there are staffing shortages, or excesses. If you have subjects that are not allocated, or a lot of staff overloaded, this suggests that you need more staffing in this faculty. If all subjects are allocated and a lot of staff are underloaded this suggests that you have excess staff in this faculty. The load margin at the bottom of each faculty view is also useful in determining staffing needs. Any faculty with a negative load margin needs more staff.

When staffing the file, it is important to have as many (ideally all) time allowances as possible entered and assigned to staff as this may impact on staffing in some faculties.

It is important to remember that this is a sample staffing with the purpose of identifying areas of need. While it will form the basis of the staff for your timetable build, retaining the flexibility to swap staffing around to resolve clashes will make a better final timetable. With this in mind, we don’t recommend you tell staff their loads until you are sure that you can produce a clash-free timetable with good spreads.