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Academic year planning
Model terms, courses, staff, and governance before automatic timetable generation begins.
Juho Isola, Smootables founder
When should academic year planning finish before the timetable solver runs? Most schools need aligned terms, a stable course catalog, and a resource model covering teachers, rooms, and equipment. Planning teams often discover gaps only after export to Untis or when a constraint solver returns an unusable timetable.
These guides explain how planners structure the year, govern planning cycles across departments, and hand off clean data to automatic timetabling. They reference Excel workflows schools replace and the validation checks Smootables runs before generation starts.
These guides cover planner process and decisions, not a Smootables product comparison. To evaluate capabilities, see school year planning software.
Guides in this topic
Select a guide below for process-focused depth on each step.
Term and holiday structure
Reconciling externally set dates into one trusted count of teaching weeks, with training days and exam windows mapped.
Read guide →Course catalog planning
Blocks, bands, sets, and option patterns, judged by the satisfaction rate they deliver against their staffing cost.
Read guide →Resource and staff modeling
The curriculum audit against the staff loading chart at the chosen contact ratio, plus rooms, expertise, and part-time patterns.
Read guide →Planning cycle governance
Named owners, staged sign-off before construction, a time-boxed options window, and change control that prices rework.
Read guide →Timetabling handoff
Block builds, combing charts, clash tables, and what-if trials: the evidence that the plan is ready for placement.
Read guide →
Related product pages
- School year planning softwareA planning workspace to model academic years, terms, courses, groups, teachers, rooms, and equipment before automatic timetable generation begins.
- Automatic school timetabling softwareConstraint-based timetable generation built into a structured planning workspace, with pre-solve validation, infeasibility reports, and full planner editing afterwards.
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Book a walkthrough and we will map Smootables to your planning, workload, and timetabling process.