Key takeaways
- Placements take one to two full days per week, plus travel, off-site.
- Clashes between placement days and core subjects are a documented top cause of dropout.
- Map the full delivery scope at year start, before subject-selection advice goes out.
- A placement day is a reservation, not a gap: nothing else schedules into it.
The placement map
One map, at year start, before selection advice.
- Which programmes include placements, and in which periods of the year
- Days per week each placement consumes, travel included
- Which core subjects the affected students must still receive
- Where each core subject sits relative to placement days
- Students whose combinations put a core subject on a placement day
- The escalation route when a clash cannot be scheduled away
Reducing the clash risk
The sequence works because it runs before commitments harden.
- Map the full vocational delivery scope at the start of the year.
- Mark placement days and travel as reserved on the affected groups' grids.
- Place core subjects for those groups on the remaining days first.
- Feed the map into subject-selection advice for the next intake.
- Review each student combination against the map before confirming it.
- Escalate the combinations that cannot avoid a clash; do not let them fail silently.
How to do this in Smootables: workplace delivery on the lesson
Workplace learning is a delivery mode on the placement or the individual lesson, set with the Workplace learning (no teacher) option in the teacher selector; remote delivery is its own mode via Remote (no room). Each shows as a distinct badge on the grid, so a placement day reads as what it is rather than as an empty slot, and the two modes are mutually exclusive on a lesson.
Because the mode releases the school-side teacher and room, the solver and the workload numbers treat placement time correctly: no phantom teacher hours, no room booked for a student who is at an employer.
A reservation, not a gap
The difference is enforcement. A gap is where somebody helpfully schedules a catch-up class; a reservation is a day the grid defends. Making placement days visible and typed, rather than blank, is most of the battle.
Students on individualised combinations concentrate the risk, since their grids have less slack; that side is covered in individual pathways. The commercial view of vocational scheduling sits on vocational college timetable software.
Questions planners ask about work-based learning
Why does the mapping have to happen before subject selection?
Because the clash is baked in at selection time. A student advised into a core subject that only runs on their placement day is set up to fail months before the first absence shows; the sourced link runs from that clash straight to dropout and underperformance. Advice given with the placement map open prevents it.
Does travel time really belong in the timetable?
It belongs in the reservation. A placement one to two days a week comes with travel on those days; if the grid schedules teaching against the travel windows, the timetable works on paper and fails in the corridor.
What about employers, supervision, and funding?
Out of the timetable's scope, deliberately. This guide covers what placement does to the grid: days consumed, travel, and clash risk. Recruitment and supervision are programme management with their own owners.