Software to help schools create their timetables hardly sounds exciting, but it is a growth area and one that according to experts can have a direct impact on educational standards. Sounds too good to be true, but less so when you consider that most school timetables are developed by the Deputy Head and take between two to eight weeks to complete. Several companies offer timetabling software with the biggest being Capita (Nova T2 and T3) and the newest entrant to this market being Bromcom (e-Timetable).
Getting timetables right may seem like a complex administrative task, but it can also have significant implications for learning according to Roy Williams of Edutimetabling. ‘Developing a good timetable should be student and learning led, not driven by administrative convenience. The complexity of managing staffing, physical resources, split campuses and the like really can have a direct impact on learning outcomes. A Deputy Head’s job should be focusing on improving learning, not juggling the complexities of a timetable’.
While Edutimetabling use Capita’s Nova software, what they offer is an educationally-led service. According to Roy Williams, ‘Having good software like Nova helps, but the real key is having staff who are experienced timetable developers and who also understand the complexities of running schools – a pretty rare combination of skills that we look for in all our staff’.
So schools have two basic choices, use the timetabling software that’s available or outsource it to specialists. Right now the largest element of this market is in software sales to schools with outsourcing being a much smaller market. Apparently one of the things that holds back outsourcing is that bringing in external help normally requires a rewriting of the job specification of the current job holder (normally the Deputy Head). This takes time and even then outsourcing providers have to show the value of their offering. Roy Williams thinks that this is not a bad thing. ‘Education is increasingly evidence-led and so to succeed in this business we have to be able to prove the advantages of what we offer. That won’t happen overnight, but we think we can grow our business and build a sustainable competitive advantage because we are prepared to invest in the research that we believe will show that the benefit in outsourcing timetabling is fundamentally about improving educational outcomes’.
