E10 - Help manual rooming

Tes Timetable discourages manual room changes, as it is not the best practice. If the tools for auto rooming are used and the workflow followed, manual room changes should not be required and auto rooming will provide better outcomes.  Please take the time to review your options below, and see if you can learn a better approach to address your rooming needs.

Where the timetable is not yet published or 'live', you can easily make many global room changes as this does not cause disruption to users. Use the Rooms > Room allocation (CTRL-R) > ActionAuto rooms feature. If you are not happy with the results, you need to tune your requirements properly. E10 consultants regularly take schools through a tuning process where users who initially doubt the process can get it right, discovering that proper tuning results in all rooms being allocated to high quality, and without any manual adjustments needed at all. Please work with your E10 consultant if this is not yet the case as manual room changes definitely signify a problem if being done prior to publishing a solution.

Where a timetable is in operation and 'live', please consider the reason you are wishing to make a manual room change:

E10 can easily balance equity on allocation of science labs across years or across classes, provided the room options and preferences are set correctly in Settings > Rooms > Specialist rooms to be shared evenly.

Ensure all rooms have their size listed correctly. Ensure you have the Size in Room > Room data (F5) and #Stu in Class > Class data (F6) set correctly for all classes. Ensure any sub-classes have this field set if they are being used to allocate split-room types.

Use Rooms > Room allocations (CTRL-R) > Actionbar: Improve > Fix clashes as this is the primary tool for making any changes to a working timetable. This tool will solve clashes and room classes which do not already have a room assigned  with a minimum number of moves. Even if you wish to make manual changes, we strongly advise you use this tool initially, and only then make changes if you still want to. Please discuss with your E10 consultant if you feel your incrementally changed rooming needs are not being managed correctly by these tools.

Check your teachers are correctly listed to their home rooms in Rooms > Room data (F5) or Teachers > Teacher data (F2). Ensure all home rooms are part of the subject options. You can adjust the weight of algorithms to promote teacher home rooms over preferred educational room type or rooming consistency – where there is need for compromise. See  Rooms > Room allocations (CTRL-R) > Actionbar: Auto room; parameter 'Lesson not in teacher's home room'.

Use  Rooms > Room allocations (CTRL-R) > Actionbar: Improve > Fix clashes. See above.

Please check carefully that your classes' requirements are correctly requesting the preferred room type. If E10 algorithms did not allocate the best room, check there was not a good reason for this such as the need to promote rooming consistency, teacher home rooms or equity in allocation of rooms to all other classes. If you feel you can manually 'improve' the rooming quality with a manual room swap, this indicates a bug – please send your file to E10 with details on which class and periods and rooms involved, so we can diagnose the issue, or (more commonly) advise how to better tune the rooming requirements so this issue does not occur in future.

You may also consider  Rooms > Room allocations (CTRL-R) > Actionbar: Improve > Optimise rooming this feature will retain many existing room assignments, but yet make changes in a few key areas to improve the educational quality of preferred room types. This feature has some change disruption, but largely retains existing rooms. This is a good option where there has been a degree of timetable change and it is expected to have some room changes across the board – just not a 'large degree' of change.

To keep students in a home room, assign this room as the preferred (or even sole) room option for all the 7A classes in Classes > Class data (F6): RoomPref  column. 

Where a class has some periods in room type A, and some periods in room type B, set up a split room class structure. This is common for one period in the PC lab, or PDHPE split into theory and practical etc. Use the function Manage sub-classes in Classes > Class data (F6). In Class data, right-click on the class and select Manage sub-classes > chose Different components type and how many sub-classes you need > OK.  This will give the opportunity to assign e.g. 3 of the PDHPE classes to a theory room and 5 classes to a practical room. The sub-classes can also be used for different teachers at once, different rooms at once or different things in different rotations for the same class.

Note there is rarely need to set this up for Science classes unless you actively WANT some periods in theory rooms, as E10's quity process automatically balances scarce specialist room use across classes.

Set up a sub-class to assign an 'additional' room for a class, allowing teamwork where students can spread across one or more additional rooms for as many periods as specified. In Class data (F6), right-click on the class and select Manage sub-classes > chose  Different rooms at once type and how many sub-classes you need > OK.  This will give the opportunity to assign an additional room for all the periods or for some of the periods.

Rooms > Room allocations (CTRL-R) > Actionbar: Room new rotation, you may consider this feature to room a new rotation. This will room the new rotation with minimal interruption to the full-year classes. Do not run Auto room as this will affect all classes, including full-year classes – and cause disruption with lots of change. Rather, use the Fix clashes, as this feature will assign rooms to the new rotation classes that do not have them, but will not disrupt the full-year classes. Where you want a rotation class to 'retain' the old room when it changes subject – this is possible to achieve to an extent via the use of room preferences, set the new class with a room preference of the old room assignment, as this will almost always be assigned when you run the very helpful Fix clashes command.

Never assign the same room to two classes, even if they 'share' the room. The correct approach is to (in Classdata (F6)) assign the room to class A, and link class B to class A and set the Roompref for class B to 'None'. This way the room can be shared automatically and without it appearing as a clash on the timetable. Where room sharing occurs for some but not all periods, just set up a sub-class structure where some periods require a room (so are not room sharing), while the other periods do not need a room (so do share the room of the linked class). In Class data (F6), right-click on the class and select Manage sub-classes > chose the  Different rooms at once type and how many sub-classes you need > OK. 

There are always some degree of change due to obscure 'personal' reasons, such as a teacher seeing a room is free and 'wanting' it for some odd periods. This could be because the room is sunnier, has a better heater or outlook, or is closer to the staff room etc. In many cases, these personal criteria can be coded as requirements such as one English room being the 'preferred' English room out of the set. In other cases, however it is too much trouble to specify requirements for somewhat arbitrary requirements that often change with the timetable or the staff involved. In these cases, the manual rooming is appropriate, provided you are very clear that the issue does not fall into any of the many listed above – which can be better solved with requirement changes. Specific room changes for one odd period can best be done in a timetable view. In the timetable select the period, press 'R' on the keyboard and select the correct room for the one odd period.