Constraint recipe
A daily cap limits how many periods one teacher teaches on a single day. A teacher can be within an 18-period weekly contract and still face six lessons on Monday. Count each teacher's assigned periods per day against your policy cap. If many teachers exceed it at once, you have a staffing or curriculum problem, not only a scheduling one.
Key takeaways
- Daily caps control concentration, not total weekly obligation.
- Count periods per teacher per day before blaming the generator.
- Weekly overload makes any daily cap impossible to meet.
- Review gaps and consecutive lessons whenever you move load across days.
What a daily cap actually controls
A teacher might teach 18 periods per week within contract but still face six on Monday. The daily cap targets that shape. It does not replace weekly hour checks or contact-ratio planning, which compare total teaching against the contract.
Mark the cap hard only if policy never allows an exception. Many schools keep it soft so the timetable can show where the cap breaks and why, instead of failing to generate.
A worked example: six on Monday, two on Friday
Mr. Aho teaches 18 periods per week, inside his contract. The policy cap is five lessons per day. His Monday holds six while Friday holds two, so the week is legal in total and still breaks policy on one day.
Before: Monday exceeds the cap of 5
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | 7A | 7B | |||
| P2 | 7B | 7A | 8B | 7A | |
| P3 | 8A | 8A | 8C | 9A | 8B |
| P4 | 8B | 9A | 8A | 8C | |
| P5 | 9A | 7B | |||
| P6 | 8C |
- Lesson
- Over the daily cap
After: 8C moved from Monday P6 to Friday P4
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | 7A | 7B | |||
| P2 | 7B | 7A | 8B | 7A | |
| P3 | 8A | 8A | 8C | 9A | 8B |
| P4 | 8B | 9A | 8A | 8C | |
| P5 | 9A | 7B | |||
| P6 |
- Lesson
- Moved lesson
Before accepting the move, check Friday for class 8C, the room, and Mr. Aho's Friday consecutive run. If assigned teaching already exceeds what fits into a teacher's working days, no daily cap can fix it; the load itself has to change. Use teacher workload checks to separate a true overload from a daily shape you can still fix by moving lessons.
Check the load before you tighten the cap
- Build a table of each teacher's periods per day, like the 6 + 3 + 3 + 4 + 2 count above, and compare each day to the policy cap.
- Subtract unavailable periods and non-working days before judging: a cap of 5 on a 4-period working day is not the real limit.
- Mark the cap as hard or soft in your constraint set, and write down which teachers get exceptions.
- List the lessons on each over-cap day and note what pins them there: a specialist room, a double period, or a co-teacher.
- Move lessons to lighter days, or rebalance staffing if every day is heavy, then regenerate and recheck daily load together with gaps and consecutive runs.
Where daily caps go wrong
- Using a daily cap to hide weekly hours that already exceed the contract
- Applying the same cap to part-time staff without a pro-rata adjustment
- Moving a lesson to another day without checking the class and room clashes there
In Smootables
Smootables has no per-day lesson cap rule. The daily shape is controlled by the Teacher Daily Balance preference instead: open Settings, then Timetabling, and raise Teacher Daily Balance (0 to 200, default 0). The app describes it as spreading teacher lessons evenly across days, so a six-plus-two week like the example above gets pushed toward an even shape where availability allows.
The hard limit that always applies is weekly: each teacher's Weekly max hours is enforced at generation, and an over-assignment is listed in Validation Errors before a run starts. Use the balance weight for shape and the weekly maximum for the ceiling.
- Raise Teacher Daily Balance and compare the per-day counts across two runs.
- Keep Weekly max hours at the contract value so true overload is caught as a validation error, not a heavy Monday.
Quick answers
Should a daily lesson cap be hard?
Only if policy must never be broken. Many schools keep daily caps soft so exceptions stay visible in the result instead of blocking generation.
What should I check before lowering the cap?
Weekly hours, part-time working days, double periods, specialist rooms, and whether the curriculum assigns too many lessons to too few staff.