Key takeaways
- Travel windows go into the schedule as first-class objects, not into breaks.
- Offerings are campus-scoped; sharing a course across sites is an explicit decision.
- Shared lines are constrained by travel and transport capacity, and someone must own that trade.
- A cross-campus teacher's load is one load; audit it as a sum, not per site.
The cross-site facts
Per campus pair, before placement.
- Travel time between sites, at the times of day people actually travel
- Teachers working on more than one campus, and their combined loads
- Courses shared across sites, and the transport capacity behind them
- Specialist spaces that exist on one site only
- Which offerings are campus-scoped and which genuinely span sites
- Who owns the travel trade-off when it binds
Placing a shared line
Shared lines fail at the seams, so place the seams first.
- Confirm the shared course is worth its transport against local delivery.
- Fix the travel windows for every teacher and student group that crosses.
- Place the shared sessions so both sites' grids respect those windows.
- Check transport capacity against the students actually travelling.
- Audit cross-campus teacher loads as sums across sites.
- Review the line each cycle; transport costs and demand both drift.
How to do this in Smootables: campuses as scope
When this resource can’t be scheduled
J. Rivera · Availability rules apply school-wide across campuses.
Dates when unavailable (full day)
In-day time settings (repeating weekly)
Campuses are set up in Settings under School Profile, and they can represent physical locations or study fields, so the same scoping serves both kinds of multi-site school. The header's campus selector switches context, with All Campuses for the whole-school view; resources are assigned per campus (Available to all campuses or assigned to specific ones), and the curriculum is built per campus.
Cross-campus teachers are audited as one load: the workload panel counts hours from other campuses into the same totals, and availability rules apply school-wide across campuses, so a travel window entered as an in-day rule is respected on every site's timetable at once.
Distance is a constraint, not an inconvenience
Treating travel as a first-class constraint changes the questions. Instead of "can this teacher take the 11:00 on the north site", the grid asks "is there a travel window between their 9:00 here and anything there", which is answerable before the clash happens. The availability mechanics that encode it are in teacher availability.
Students on cross-site pathways inherit the same arithmetic with less slack, which is where this guide meets individual pathways; the commercial comparison for multi-site colleges sits on vocational college timetable software.
Questions planners ask about multi-campus delivery
Why not just leave travel to the breaks?
Because the sourced principle exists for a reason: transit eaten out of breaks and preparation time is instructional capacity lost invisibly, plus fatigue that compounds. A travel window in the grid is honest about the cost and protects the teacher's actual entitlements.
Which courses should be shared across campuses?
The ones worth their transport. The documented optimisation frames it exactly that way: choose the shared courses within bus-capacity limits and report which students travel. Sharing a course is a cost decision, not a courtesy.
Who notices when a cross-campus teacher is overloaded?
Nobody, if each site audits only its own share. The load is one load across sites; the audit has to sum it, and the timetables on both sites have to respect the same travel windows.