E10 - Create a Duty Roster

Modified on Thu, 14 Aug at 12:55 AM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preamble

Preamble

E10 offers tools to create duty rosters manually or automatically. The Auto-staff algorithm considers the teacher’s overall load.

Follow the steps below to set up a duty roster.

Step 1: Check the Grid Structure

Go to Setup > Grid Structure. Ensure the grid contains period slots to place the duties. The View menu gives options to view the grid showing bell times or period durations.

Record the period codes for the time slots requiring duties, as these codes will be entered into the Duty area screen later.

Step 2: Duty Areas

Go to Teachers > Duty roster > Duty areas tab. Define the duty areas and periods that require staff duty timetabling.

Function:

New duty area: Enter duty details into the bottom blank row.

Delete duty area: Click in the code cell of the duty to be deleted, hit Delete on your keyboard.

Columns:

Code: The short code for each duty, e.g. CAN (Canteen), BUS1 (Bus Area 1), SENGYM (Senior Gym). The duty code must be distinct from all other period names in the Grid Structure. For example, 'RE' should not be used as a duty code if 'RE' is already assigned to the recess period. For duty areas requiring multiple teachers, a unique code must be assigned to each—e.g., Oval1 and Oval2—as only one teacher can be allocated to a duty area at a time.
Periods: Enter each duty period code for the designated duty areas, separated by commas. If duties occur on specific days rather than throughout the entire cycle, include both the day code and the period code (e.g., MonR for Monday Recess). Alternatively, double-click in the Periods cell and select the appropriate periods from the grid.

Duration: Duration (in minutes): This column is based on the grid structure's bell times, as outlined in Step 1, and cannot be modified in this screen. Where the specified periods have varying durations, the word 'approx' will appear, followed by the estimated number of minutes.

The 'Typical duty duration' is used to assign the correct amount of Duties to each staff member. It is used in conjunction with the Duty Loads value to specify the allowable duty duration per staff member. Typical duration x Duty loads = Allowable duty duration per staff member. The 'Typical duty duration' value is based on the median period length as defined by the bell times in the Grid structure. This value can be adjusted as needed to accommodate the required MaxDuties.

If the duties defined have differing durations, it may be preferable to count allocated duties by minutes rather than by period count. To do this, select 'Show / edit typical durations' from the Action bar and enter an appropriate length of time to use as a base unit of calculation. E.g. 0:01 (1 minute) could be used to count all duties in multiples of one minute.

Teacher prefs: If this field is left blank, all teachers will be considered for this duty. Alternatively, you can specify eligible teachers by entering individual teacher codes or selecting an entire faculty. Once teachers are assigned in this field, each teacher can be assigned a preference level for this duty (Preferred, Fallback, or Desperate). This will also add these teachers to the teacher set for the relevant duty area.

When constructing the duty roster, E10 will prioritise assigning this duty to preferred teachers. However, staffing is not guaranteed if duty rules and workload constraints limit flexibility.

To improve the likelihood of a fully staffed duty roster, you can enable 'auto-staffing', allowing E10 to consider 'Every teacher as fallback for every area' should none of your selected teachers be available.

If preferred teachers are modified or removed from the Teacher Prefs field, the user must also navigate to Teachers > Subject Teacher > All Faculties to delete the corresponding teacher codes for the relevant duty areas. Sort by the Faculty column and locate the Duties faculty, where all duty areas are listed. Update or remove subject teachers as needed for each duty area.

DisplayName: Enter the description of this duty, in the format you want to see on teachers’ timetables.

Step 3: Duty Loads

This screen displays the precise number of hours and minutes each teacher spends teaching classes, receiving allowances, or supervising duties throughout the timetable cycle. This information helps determine the appropriate allocation of the MaxDuties value, ensuring that underloaded teachers may be assigned more duties than those who are on or over load.

Go to the the Duty loads tab. Enter the maximum number of actual duties each teacher may be allocated.

Alternatively, if the Typical Duty Duration has been altered to 0:01 (one minute), enter the maximum number of minutes the teacher should be allocated.

Columns:

Teacher: Not editable. Teacher name and code

MaxLoad: Not editable. The maximum available teaching load, converted to hours:minutes (not in terms of ‘periods’ as is usual in other screens). A teacher with a load of 43 periods per cycle may convert to a MaxLoad of 40 hours per cycle, which would be expressed here as ‘40:00’.

Teach: Not editable. The allocated teaching load component of each teacher converted to hours:minutes.

Allowances: Not editable. The total amount of allocated allowances for this teacher converted to hours:minutes.

LdLeft: Not editable. This is the amount of time that each teacher has available on their load, expressed in hours:minutes. This represents the value, shown in the Staff allocations (F4) screen as a number of periods, as a time (hours and minutes). If this number is a negative, the cell will also be orange coloured, and this means that a teacher is overloaded. Many schools allocate the same number of duties to all full-time teachers. But many other schools use the LdLeft value to allocate duties in such a way as to balance loads. That is, the maximum number of duties is different for each teacher. Note that the LdLeft value does not change when duties are added. LdLeft = MaxLoad – Teaching – Allowances.

DutyTot: Not editable. This shows the number of duties in hours:minutes each teacher has been allocated to, where duties have already been assigned.

FTE: Not editable. the Full-time equivalent (FTE) of the teacher, based on the FTE entry in Teachers > Teacher data (F2).

MaxDuties: Enter the maximum number of actual duties each teacher may be allocated.

Alternatively, if the Typical Duty Duration has been altered to 0:01 (one minute), enter the maximum number of minutes the teacher should be allocated.

NumDuties: Not editable. This is the number of duties that have actually been allocated. Note that if you have a duty which is significantly longer (>1.5 times) the typical duty, it will be counted as two duties.

Duties/Allowances: This area shows any duties and allowances which have been allocated to each teacher.

At the bottom is a holding area for duties which are yet to be assigned. These can be dragged from the holding area and dropped to allocate to a teacher. However, the ‘Duty Roster tab’ shows more information when manually allocating duties, such as timetable clashes.

Step 4: Auto Staff

Go to the first tab: Duty roster. You are able to:
a) auto-staff the duties
b) manually allocate the duties
c) auto-staff then manually edit
Use the rotation filter at the top right if you wish the Clash Spots to reflect the classes for staff duties for a particular rotation only.
Click on the Staff icon in the action bar on the right; 'Autostaff yard duties' to view the 'auto-staffing' parameters appears. You have the ability to influence the weighting of each parameter by choosing from a range of levels from 'Irrelevant' to 'Imperative’ for each parameter. These can be restored to the default settings at any time.

The automatic algorithm works as follows: (with the default parameter settings)

The teacher will preferably be free either the period before or the period after the duty.
If lunch is organised in two halves, then the above rule refers to the teaching period before and the teaching period after lunch.
The teacher must have at least one free teaching period on a day before they are granted a duty, but preferably 2.
Minimises allocating a duty if it's the teacher's first or last official duty on that day, or if the teacher is free both before and after, or if the teacher is rather busy on that day.

The 'Clear All Duties' icon below Autostaff in the action bar will clear all the duties from the grid.

Step 5: Manually edit if needed

Check the generated duty roster, the allocated duties for the teachers and their timetables. Manually edit the duty roster to your needs, by drag and drop a teacher name to the correct area or period in the Duty roster tab.

Step 6: Publish Roster

Once the Duty roster is completed, the roster can be printed or exported to Excel using the print or Excel icon at the top left of the screen.
The View menu provides options to display teacher code or names.