Key takeaways
- The sequence: collect selections, form groups, assign individually with exemptions.
- Individual pathways still schedule as groups; the individuality lives in the assignment layer.
- Rotating limited labs across cohorts and pathways is a recognised soft constraint.
- Request satisfaction is the quality measure, and it trades against staffing and space.
From selections to assignments
The sourced three-move sequence, expanded.
- Collect per-student course and elective selections inside a time-boxed window.
- Tally demand per course; the tallies size the sections.
- Form groups and option blocks from the demand, respecting lab and station capacity.
- Assign students to groups individually, recording exemptions where a path deviates.
- Measure request satisfaction and rework the blocks where popular combinations collide.
- Freeze assignments and publish; late deviations become exemptions, not rebuilds.
Facilities rotate through pathways too
Rotating limited labs and facilities across cohorts and pathways is a recognised soft constraint of vocational scheduling: the welding bays serve several pathways in one year, and the rotation has to respect all their patterns at once. Pathway design that ignores facility rotation produces groups that exist on paper and queue in reality.
The capacity arithmetic behind that is in workshop and lab scheduling.
How to do this in Smootables: students as a resource
Students are a resource type of their own in Resources, alongside groups. A placement carries its assigned student groups and, where a pathway deviates, individual students, with per-student exemptions out of a group; that maps the collect-form-assign sequence directly onto the planning data.
On the timetable, the grid filters by individual student, so any student's own schedule (their groups, their exceptions, their placement days) reads as one view rather than a cross-referencing exercise.
Keeping the individuality honest
Two disciplines keep individual pathways from decaying. First, deviations go through exemptions, not through quiet edits to shared groups; the group grid stays truthful for the many while the few are handled explicitly. Second, satisfaction gets measured and reported, so the trade between student choice and delivery cost stays visible to whoever signs it off.
Splitting mechanics for the group side are in the subgroup splits recipe; pathways that span sites pick up the extra constraints covered in multi-campus delivery.
Questions planners ask about individual pathways
Does individualisation mean one timetable per student?
Each student ends up with their own view, and the underlying schedule is still built from groups. Group formation is what makes individual pathways schedulable at all; a thousand truly independent timetables would be a thousand-body problem.
What is an exemption for?
The student whose path genuinely deviates from every group: a prior qualification, a repeated unit, an external commitment. Exemptions handle deviation one student at a time, which keeps the group structure clean for everyone else.
Why do pathway assignments go wrong?
Usually upstream: selections collected without deadlines, groups formed before demand was tallied, or limited lab capacity ignored until assignment. The assignment step inherits every shortcut taken before it.