Describe Your School Day

Nothing in the timetable can be built until your school has a bell schedule: the shape of its day, period by period, with its breaks. The templates give you one of ours to edit. Describe your day builds yours.

It asks four things, and your head teacher can answer all of them without looking anything up:

• When does school start?
• When does it end?
• How long is one period?
• When are your breaks, and how long is each?

That is the whole form. Everything else about your day is worked out from it.

What it does not ask

How many periods you have. That is the number a school gets wrong once and then lives with, and it is the one number that follows from the other four. A day running 08:00 to 14:20 in 40-minute periods, with a 20-minute break at 10:00 and 40 minutes for lunch at 11:40, comes to eight periods. You should not have to work that out, and you should not have to type each one.

The day appears as you describe it

Underneath the questions, Your Day fills in as you answer, listing every period with its bell times and the breaks in between. Nothing is written until you press Create, so you can move lunch, change the period length and watch the afternoon shift until the day looks like yours.

When the numbers do not divide

Periods rarely fit a day exactly, and we say so rather than quietly bending one. If your break is at 10:15 and your periods are 40 minutes, the morning holds three of them and 15 minutes are left over, so the schedule says exactly that, in amber, above the table.

Those are notes, not errors. A short gap before a break is ordinary and plenty of schools run one. What we will not do is stretch a period to 55 minutes to close the gap, because you would then have one odd lesson in your week that you never asked for and would have to go hunting for later.

Some descriptions cannot make a day at all, and those are refused with the reason: a break that runs past home time, two breaks that overlap, or a period longer than the stretch it has to fit in.

Afterwards

What you get is an ordinary bell schedule. Nothing remembers it was built this way. Rename it, move a bell, add a period, delete one, assign classes to it, or duplicate it for a shorter Friday, exactly as you would one you typed by hand.

If your week is not the same every day, build the ordinary day here first and then set the odd period to the days it runs. Describing the day assumes every period runs on every teaching day, which is true of almost all of them.