School circular year planner

A circular year planner gives the whole school year one shared view. School leaders and planners can put holidays, terms, exam periods, parent evenings, report deadlines, staff training, trips, open days, and timetable-building windows around the same cycle instead of checking separate calendars.

The shape makes busy periods easier to spot. Assessment weeks, reporting, events, and planning work often collect in the same month. On a wheel, those overlaps sit next to each other, so a team can move dates before the calendar reaches staff and students.

Rings turn the plan into a working document for different groups. Use one ring for whole-school dates, another for leadership work, and others for year groups, departments, exams, communications, or operations. Filters then let you show the full year or narrow the view to the people in the meeting.

Schools use the wheel at planning days, senior leadership meetings, exam calendar reviews, parent communication checks, and handovers between timetable planners. Download/Share offers an A4 PDF for printouts, CSV and Excel rows for spreadsheet work, a read-only link or iframe embed for your intranet, JSON backup, and ICS export for calendar apps. The month agenda gives the exact dates when the conversation moves from the year overview to the next few weeks.

The sample year runs from August to July and is built like a real school planning board. It starts with staff development days, term start week, an open house, budget planning, a staff wellbeing survey, autumn break, parents evening, mock exams, a winter concert, and Christmas break.

After the new year, the plan shifts into course selection, staffing review, winter sports week, spring parents evening, and the main timetable planning window. Easter break, spring fair, final exams, grading, graduation, and summer break carry the year through to July.

The point of the example is to show how different kinds of work can sit on the same wheel. Whole-school dates, teaching-team work, and leadership planning each have their own ring. School events, exams, holidays, planning tasks, and communication each have their own colour.

Labels for staff, students, and families change the view. The monthly newsletter is recurring, so one communication idea becomes a series of dates across the year instead of a single item.

This is a single planner per browser, with up to 4 rings and 80 activities after recurring events expand. Sharing is read-only: a share link or embed shows the plan to others without letting them edit it. There are no accounts, no live calendar sync beyond a one-time ICS export, and no file attachments.

The wheel coordinates when things happen across the year. School year planning in Smootables models the courses, groups, and teacher workloads behind those dates and generates the weekly timetable from the same plan.