Vocational timetabling is its own problem
Vocational college timetabling is a different problem from class-based secondary schools — not just the same schedule with harder constraints. Workshops have equipment that cannot be split. Lab cohorts mix groups in ways that do not appear on a class roster. Students follow individual pathways that diverge from their group. Workplace learning, internships, and remote lessons sit alongside campus periods. Compact courses, project weeks, and exam blocks override the regular week.
Most legacy timetable products were designed for class-based schools and bolt these scenarios on. Smootables is designed from the planning model up to handle them — and to make them the normal case, not the exception.
Scenarios this is built for
Vocational planners deal with combinations that legacy tools struggle to express:
- Workshops, labs, and specialist rooms that require specific equipment, certifications, or supervision
- Split courses where part of a module runs in a classroom and part runs in a workshop or off-site
- Mixed cohorts where students from different groups attend the same lab, lecture, or workshop
- Individual learner pathways with course choices, exemptions, and recognized prior learning
- Workplace learning, internships, and remote lessons that need to fit alongside campus periods
- Multi-campus schools with shared teachers, shared equipment, and campus-scoped courses
- Compact courses, intensives, project weeks, and exam weeks that override the standard week
Built around vocational constraints
Workshops and equipment
Equipment inventory, room-type rules, capacity, and compatibility constraints are first-class. The solver respects equipment availability the same way it respects teachers and rooms.
Mixed cohorts and pathways
Group assignments and individual student assignments live in the same model. A student can attend a group lesson, sit out the next one through an exemption, and join a different group for a lab — without breaking the plan.
Off-site and workplace learning
Off-site, remote, and workplace learning are first-class delivery modes. Periods can be scoped to non-campus locations and still appear in the published timetable.
Period overrides
School day profiles, period-level schedule overrides, and custom week structures handle project weeks, exam weeks, and compact course formats without forcing them into a class-period grid.
From program design to published vocational timetable
- Model your programs, courses, modules, and pathways, including campus and program scoping.
- Set up vocational resources: workshops, labs, specialist rooms, equipment, group structures, and teacher skills.
- Plan the academic year and terms. Allocate courses to terms, attach groups and individual students, mark exemptions, and set delivery modes.
- Validate the plan: workload, staffing pressure, capacity, equipment conflicts, and infeasibility risks are surfaced before generation.
- Generate timetables for each period. Edit and pin where needed, regenerate where useful, and use the waiting area for unplaced lessons.
- Publish to teachers, students, and operators. Manage substitutions, daily changes, and recovery from the same workspace.
Individual pathways without a parallel spreadsheet
Vocational schools usually maintain individual pathways in a separate spreadsheet because their timetable software cannot model them. That gap is where most timetable errors originate.
Smootables supports group assignments, individual student assignments, and per-placement exemptions in the core model. A student following a mixed pathway can be tracked in one place — in the plan, in the solver, and in the published timetable views — without a parallel system.
What to validate in a demo
When evaluating Smootables for a vocational college, focus on the scenarios that legacy tools usually struggle with:
- Modeling one of your specialist workshops with equipment, supervision, and capacity rules
- Adding a student with an exemption to a group lesson and following them through to the published timetable
- Running pre-generation validation on a period that you know is tight, and reading the infeasibility report
- Pinning a critical lab placement and regenerating the rest of the timetable around it
- Asking the planner AI to balance workshop usage across the week and reviewing the proposed changes before applying them
Questions vocational colleges ask
Does it support workplace learning periods?
Yes. Off-site, remote, and workplace learning are first-class delivery modes in the plan. They appear in the timetable, count towards workload where appropriate, and respect their own availability rules.
Can we model individual pathways without exporting to a spreadsheet?
Yes. Individual student assignments, group assignments, and per-placement exemptions are part of the same model the solver and views use. There is no separate pathway spreadsheet to keep in sync.
How does it handle our specialist equipment?
Equipment is modeled as a resource with inventory, compatibility, and availability rules. Workshops and labs reference the equipment they need, and the solver respects equipment constraints alongside teacher and room conflicts.
Can it handle compact courses and project weeks?
Yes. Period-level schedule overrides, custom week structures, and school day profiles handle intensives, project weeks, exam weeks, and short-term timetable experiments without forcing them into a fixed weekly grid.
How do we migrate from a legacy timetable tool?
Smootables supports structured import for spreadsheets, CSV, and legacy timetable exports, plus AI-assisted extraction from messy files. Most colleges run one full term in parallel before switching the published source of truth.