What school year planning really involves
Most schools start the academic year on a deadline they cannot move. Before any timetable is generated, planners and school leaders have to agree on a year structure — which terms exist, how the school day is shaped, what courses are offered, which groups will run, and which teachers and rooms are available.
Smootables is designed to make this planning stage as easy as possible. It is a structured planning system for academic years, terms, periods, courses, and resources, so that timetable generation has the data it needs and decisions are not scattered across spreadsheets, documents, and inboxes.
Roles in the planning cycle
School leadership
See planning progress, staffing pressure, and feasibility before the academic year locks in. Approve the year structure once the data is ready.
Timetable planners
Model academic years and terms, place courses into periods, attach groups and resources, and keep a single source of truth for the team.
Teachers and coordinators
Review proposed plans through shared links, comment on the data that affects them, and surface issues before they become published timetable problems.
A connected planning cycle
- Set up the school: campuses, academic years, terms, school day profiles, holidays, and the course catalog.
- Add resources: teachers with contracts and availability, rooms with capacity and equipment, equipment inventory, and student groups.
- Plan teaching across the year: distribute course hours over terms, assign groups and individual students, attach teacher and room preferences.
- Validate completeness: workload panels, staffing pressure indicators, and pre-generation checks flag missing data before the solver runs.
- Hand off to timetable generation with the planning context intact, instead of re-entering data into a separate tool.
Completeness checks before timetabling
Smootables surfaces planning gaps that would otherwise show up only after a failed solve:
- Courses without groups, hours, or assigned teachers
- Teacher contracts that do not match the hours they have been allocated
- Rooms or equipment required but not available in the right campus or term
- Group conflicts and individual students with overlapping pathway choices
- Periods with no plan yet, or terms with placement gaps
From year plan to optimized timetable
Because school year planning and timetable generation share the same data, you stop maintaining two parallel models. When a course moves to a different term, when a teacher reduces their contract, or when a room becomes unavailable, the plan updates in one place and the next timetable solve picks up the change.
For schools that have outgrown Excel, this is the part that changes the most: the year plan is no longer a separate artefact you reconcile against the timetable — it is the timetable's source of truth.
Questions schools ask about year planning
Who in the school should own year planning?
Most schools assign year planning to a planning team led by the school planner, with school leadership reviewing progress and approving the structure. Smootables supports multiple planners, role-based access, presence, and audit logs so the team can collaborate without overwriting each other's work.
How does Smootables get my school data that we need for the plans?
Smootables supports structured import for spreadsheets and legacy timetable exports, plus AI-assisted extraction from messy files. You can also model a year from scratch and add resources incrementally as the plan takes shape.
What happens to plans from previous years?
Academic years can be archived, cloned, and compared. Many schools reuse last year's structure as a starting point, then adjust courses, hours, and groups instead of rebuilding the model every year.
Does Smootables replace our SIS?
No. Smootables is built to be the planning and timetable source of truth, and to integrate with the SIS, MIS, LMS, identity, and calendar systems you already use.
How is this different from a spreadsheet template?
Spreadsheet templates capture a snapshot and are not built for collaborative work. Smootables keeps year structure, courses, resources, and constraints as a live model that validates itself, generates timetables, and can be edited collaboratively without breaking formulas.