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Teacher workload
Balance contract hours, part-time staff, overload checks, team teaching, and fair distribution.
Juho Isola, Smootables founder
How do schools prevent timetable generation from silently overloading teachers? Contract hours, preparation time, team-teaching splits, and part-time availability must be modeled before the solver assigns lessons. Union agreements and local policies often exceed what Excel formulas can reliably enforce.
These guides explain workload rules planners configure in Smootables: hard caps, soft targets, fair distribution across departments, and checks that surface overload before publication. They help leadership answer whether a draft timetable is equitable, not just feasible.
These guides cover planner process and decisions, not a Smootables product comparison. To evaluate capabilities, see teacher workload planning software.
Guides in this topic
Select a guide below for process-focused depth on each step.
Contract hours
Contractual caps, protected non-teaching time, and the contact ratio as the baseline every workload check audits against.
Read guide →Teacher overload
Comparing assigned load against caps and the contact ratio before placement, while rebalancing is still cheap.
Read guide →Team teaching
What shared classes do to workload accounting, and how to model several teachers on one lesson explicitly.
Read guide →Fair distribution
Equity of allocation as an explicit review: what to balance, the data that helps, and why fairness is optimized, not guaranteed.
Read guide →
Related product pages
- Teacher workload: the 1,265-hour limit and what actually reduces itTeacher workload is the total teaching and non-teaching hours a school assigns a teacher across a year, and in England it is capped: 1,265 hours of directed time annually for teachers on the standard contract. Reducing it means cutting what fills those hours before the timetable locks them in, not after.
- School year planning softwareA planning workspace to model academic years, terms, courses, groups, teachers, rooms, and equipment before automatic timetable generation begins.
See how Smootables fits your school
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