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Clever School Rooming: Strategies Part 2 Chris Cooper Last issue we introduced clever school rooming, showing how things have changed in both technology and in practices and roles within schools. This second part expands on clever school rooming, with more complex scenarios and solutions to improving your rooming quality and room use. Who Does The Rooming? In some schools, rooming is a task allocated to somebody who may not be the timetabler. The thinking in these cases is that rooming is an isolated task which can be done after the timetable has been constructed. Distributing administrative workloads in schools is good 052 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

in general, but these schools misunderstand the close dependency timetabling has on rooming and vice versa… And in particular the lost opportunity in optimising resource allocation if rooming is done in isolation after a timetable has been constructed. Best practice has the timetable constructed with explicit and highly detailed visibility of rooming requirements. Manual timetabling will only ever work around a very small number of high profile specialist rooms – such as Science labs and Art rooms. More advanced systems will construct, or move classes around, to optimise the ‘rooming potential’ of the solution. So while rooming

is not necessarily done during construction itself, the timetable is making room to accommodate requirements such as a Maths class needing one room in the PC lab, or to maximise the potential for high rooming consistency in the English rooming. If your school is still allocating rooms entirely manually, or worse – allocates the responsibility for rooming to a person who is not the timetabler, you are incurring a significant, but difficult to observe, loss of opportunity in maximising the use of your limited resources. Advanced timetabling software has been capable of completing the task to 100 per cent satisfaction of the school timetabler for several years now. This is not just to ‘save time’ on the task itself. Chess computers can now beat humans, and school rooming has become the same. It is not possible to ‘beat’ the computer in rooming quality, provided you specify the requirements properly – which can at first take time. No matter how nice the timetabler is, there is always the issue of political bias in allocating rooms – either intended, or subconscious. Why does Maths always get the best rooming, when the timetabler is in the Maths faculty! The move to computerised rooming gives total visibility of rooming requirements, which can be seen and debated by others. This is unlike manual room allocations – where if you ask why this class got this room, you would likely get a cryptic and unenlightening answer of ‘because of the timetable’. The focus on computerised rooming is to maximise the educational benefits, remove political bias in allocations, improve rooming quality, and speed up the task from a day or two, down to just minutes. There is also no need to outsource rooming to certain faculty head teachers. A common example is Science, where schools rarely get the opportunity to have all Science classes in labs as they desire. Traditionally the head of Science has been responsible for manually allocating labs to the Science classes, in a way that maximises equity. This process is no longer required when your timetable system is able to complete this task for you. Not only does it save time, but the process allows an increase in equity, as well as an increase in

occupancy rates of the specialist rooms, as the placement of classes to periods can be optimised with this highly detailed requirement being considered in the timetable generation phase. While there may be pilots in charge of their planes, there must be someone in overall control of the airport, someone who directs all planes and has overall visibility on everything that is going on. In a school context, best utilisation of resources occurs when resources can be collectively managed across the board, as opposed to dividing up the process into multiple individual responsibilities. Get More Rooms – Free! An easy way to increase occupancy rates of specialist rooms, and overall room quality, is to re-examine your curriculum structure. Sometimes a simple change in how your classes are grouped together can remove the need to build that extra science lab. Such a simple timetable structure change can significantly affect the quality of rooms assigned to your classes. Whole School Assembly Do you run a whole school assembly in a teaching period? What is the occupancy rates of your precious science labs, and other specialist rooms during this period. Zero. What a waste! By splitting into a separate junior and senior assembly, you can have your specialist rooms fully occupied in both assembly periods. It may be nice to have the whole school all together, but ensure you are aware of the opportunity cost to your rooming. The same goes for whole school sport, or any other activity structured such that your specialist rooms are forced to be vacant for a period. Half Block Science The head of science may want the ability to stream students up and down all classes, at ANY time in the year. This is easiest done by fully blocking Science. But what is the cost to rooming? Larger block sizes are harder to place clash free, which often results in many periods with lots of science classes out of labs, when other periods have half the labs unoccupied! Lab occupancy rates can be easily improved by restructuring science to half blocks, or class pairs, or by floating maths and science together (which is common)

but streaming the top two classes in each subject. Streaming can still be done in class pairs, or in half blocks. Streaming is easy, so these structures only affect changes to streaming mid-year, which may actually be less frequent than you think. Would you prefer ten more science lessons in labs every timetable cycle, with a class structure that makes it ‘slightly’ harder to change streaming mid-year for some students? Review Curriculum Structures A big school was about to embark on building a new science lab at the cost of over $100k, as growing classes were never getting enough time in labs. A curriculum review by Edval Timetables then showed how a small and simple change to the class structure would allow the school to access more additional lab periods, than if they built the new lab and kept the old structure. By understanding the true impact of timetable structures, it can be like getting an extra science lab for free! Mix Core And Prac Classes Practical classes like art and technology need specialist rooms, yet many schools have highly inflexible structures for these key learning areas. Best practice is to align class lists, so that practical subjects can float within themselves, and also with core classes. This gives room fluidity, which leads to significant increases in occupancy rates, as well as better fitting in part timers if need be. So if your school is blocking prac classes together, or locking them into ‘fixed patterns’ such as two tech classes always on with two art classes, you are missing out. Do you split two core classes into three prac, or three core classes into four prac? When did you last review this structure? Have enrolment numbers changed? Change your structures, and find it is almost like increasing specialist room capacity for free! Share Rooms Some specialist rooms are in high demand. It may actually be possible to share a room between two classes on certain periods only. Provided both class sizes are small enough so they do not exceed the room capacity, some schools creatively room both classes together perhaps for

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a combined double period practical. In other cases, two separate classes, with two separate teachers, are allocated the one room (e.g. Woodwork or PC lab). While not desirable, in some cases this creative solution is better than a class not having the room at all for a period. It maximises the use of key resources, which may not be available in other ways, which is sort of getting more rooms for your school. Some schools even get portable dividers to segregate rooms into two halves ‘where needed’. Get creative! Use Small Rooms Examine a room use report, and identify which rooms are under-used in your timetable. How can you better use these? By ‘allowing’ these to be used more, you take pressure off the high demand rooms. A common oversight is to ignore small rooms, and not include them as a primary room for classes to consider. By only using these as a last resort, you lose flexibility and keep pressure on other rooms. Let your software worry about keeping large classes out of small rooms, rather than exclude them as primary room ‘options’ for subjects. Use The Library Some schools never consider using their library seminar rooms as ‘timetabled rooms’. Why not? You should consider using every single usable space in your school, to maximise your options. There could be many small, senior classes which could fit there, on regular occasions, and not disturb other library users. Book Rooms Properly The cyclical timetable is not the only opportunity schools have to maximise the use of their resources. Significant benefits are gained from having a good room booking system. Many basic room booking systems work in a stand-alone fashion, and require the school to periodically upload their cyclical timetable. More modern room booking systems are directly integrated with the timetable software itself, and specifically with the daily management module. Classes which normally occupy many high demand rooms may not run during school camps and excursions. These rooms are often left vacant on these days, if the school runs an inferior room booking

system. More advanced systems allow users to book these rooms which have been vacated due to daily events, and this can provide a significant increase in occupancy rates. It is not uncommon to see science or computer labs used more than 20 per cent above what they were originally timetabled on a cyclical basis, solely due to teachers taking advantage of daily vacancies. Systems which are manual, or clunky to use, or require onerous approval processes, strongly discourage teachers from booking rooms. There is a loss of educational opportunity, solely due to teachers naturally making ‘less use’ of school resources. The best system allows any teacher to book any room quickly and easily, and catering to opportunistic daily vacancies (like getting more rooms for free!) Case Studies Kiama High School is one of the largest in NSW. Darrell Shephard has been relieving principal for several years, but very involved in the school’s timetable. He has used Edval software, and advice from consultants to revolutionise the rooming in his busy school. Students are now getting a lot more of the key rooms they need for specialised learning. This is a result of some changes to his curriculum structure, as well as new software and processes for completing the room allocation. Deputy principal Nerida Walker from Sydney Secondary College Balmain reports with increased interest in Food Tech, they needed to run two classes together. But the school has only one main kitchen, and a second, less preferable theory room. Every day one Food Tech class was out of the kitchen, due to their structure. A change to the timetable as suggested by consultants, has led to the school being able to room both classes into the kitchen every period. Chatswood High School is a large, selective high school. Deputy principal Justin Hong adopted new timetabling software and practices, which resulted in significant improvements to rooming allocated to classes, and streamlining of processes.

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New Rooming Practices The new workflow has the timetabler responsible for the rooming process overall, but not actually responsible for allocating any rooms to a class, so much as managing school rooming requirements at a broad level, and ensuring the rooming solution produced by the system cannot be improved in any way, by a human. The process is iterative, meaning where an anomaly is identified, changes are made to the requirements that lead to this outcome, as opposed to making the change at a ‘room assignment’ level. The new workflow also means that rooming is done far more holistically and directly as a part of the timetable construction, instead of a separate task at the conclusion. Timetable algorithms may elect to move a Maths class from one period to another, solely due to the knowledge that this class needs access to a computer lab on one period, which would perhaps not have been possible under the previous periods allocated to these Maths classes. This is one tiny example of how modern timetable construction improves the timetable construction process, by driving a better outcome. The old method may have required the maths classes to be swapped manually at the end, to address the computer lab needs. This is inefficient, compared to having the algorithms understand the requirement in a broader sense, and at an earlier stage. The Board of Studies now uses Edval timetabling software to construct the NSW HSC timetable for over 70,000 students each year. An important scheduling task, once done by hand, is now computerised. Students are benefitting greatly as a result, with improved quality in exam schedules, and exams more spread out for each student overall. Rooming is the same: The move to computerised resource allocation provides significant scope to greatly improve the quality of the outcome, and this is far more important than making the ‘task’ easier, or faster. Quality is the key. Are you happy with your school’s room utilisation? Perhaps it is time to review your timetable software, and your rooming ETS allocation software.