If you were a teacher or administrator at a large comprehensive school in the 1980s or earlier, please can you answer a question?

[Antarcticant]

I was at a large comprehensive in the 80s - about 1200 pupils - and I have lately been wondering how timetables were worked out for such a large number of people, without the benefit of computers. Where did they start? How did they avoid clashes, double-booking of rooms, teachers etc?

If you can shed any light on this I would be fascinated.

A family friend used to do the timetabling for a large secondary school, pre computers.

I remember seeing these massive boards in his study with tiny pieces of coloured, patterned pieces of paper all over it. Each piece of paper represented a student, or subject. M

He said that he used to start with the O and A level students to make sure they could all do their subjects.

Just looking at the boards used to give me itchy fingers! I was always desperate to move a few labels. 🤣

Pen and paper! Each department did their own timetable, they were all submitted to SMT and kind of joined together from there. Only works if you allocate rooms to subjects though.

Oh, goodness - 1000 + tiny pieces of paper to place (and there weren't even post-it notes back then!) - it makes my head hurt to think about it. Massive boards sounds sensible. Thank you for the insight!

Only works if you allocate rooms to subjects though

Yes, my school did that - all the rooms for each subject were in their own section or separate building. Basically the teachers mostly stayed in their own room and the pupils had to move from room to room. Each department doing their own would make it less daunting I suppose although I can imagine some juggling would be needed by the central team.@

My school used a massive board, about the size of an office wall and coloured magnetic strips for the different subjects and years. It was in the Deputy Head's office.

It was fascinating and I always wanted to help sort it out.

I asked our deputy head once, probably in 1990. This was basically his answer. I love logic puzzles, I’d have loved to have helped. I think I was asking because the timetable didn’t allow me to do both English and further maths at A-level.

My uncle was a maths teacher and he used to spend weeks of the summer holiday doing the timetable for the whole school. I even helped him one year but I have no recollection of what that involved! 😂

Love the fact that you’ve just started a thread about this 😆😆

I can imagine it must have been hugely satisfying once it started to come together, like a giant logic puzzle.

I knew there would be Mumsnetters who'd be able to answer my question!

Our school timetable is too complex for a computer programme, so although it’s done on an excel sheet, it’s basically the same as the big wall charts mentioned above. I love a logical puzzle, but that is beyond me! I did do the timetables for 15 teaching assistants a couple of times, that was fine, apart from people whinging that they didn’t like X subject, Y teacher or Z child.

My History teacher did it - apparently they bought a new, whizzy computer programme, laboriously put in all the rooms, groups etc and computer said no. So they went back to her, a floor full of paper, and a week of hard thinking. This would have been early 90s.

our school timetable is too complex for a computer programme

Oh, I'd naively imagined there'd be software nowadays where you just fed in the information and it produced one . But I suppose it must be hard to programme for the kind of quirks you'd need to consider.

Pegboards we’re used, great bog board with lots of holes in lined and rows. Different coloured pegs for each subject and then pegs with teacher’s initials once the subjects were in. One timetabler I knew told me how she had just finished the timetable a few years ago on the board and when she went in the next morning the whole board had fallen on the floor and the pegs had fallen out.

Sorry this a crap response I have nothing to offer..... but my dad was a senior teacher and after he retired he went back to the school and did the timetabling. It was a 10 form per year school.

I know it took him most of the year to do it. This was probably 20 years ago and he had huge pinboards with lots of coloured dots and he would cut out lots of little bits of paper 🥰

floor full of paper, and a week of hard thinking

I feel bad now that we'd grumble about the timetable if it wasn't to our liking. Double maths on Friday afternoon, or Games first thing in the morning when it was freezing cold. I hope the staff didn't overhear us after they'd sweated blood over it.

I don't ever remember any timetabling errors at the start of term, which was amazing really!

Oh, no, that really is the stuff of nightmares 😱

I'd completely forgotten about peg boards but now you mention it I can picture them dotted around my schools in the 70s and 80s.

Our maths teacher's husband did it. He was also a maths teacher. There were post-its, no computers involved.

She'd taught us since first year so called in a few favours to ensure we could do the A level choices we wanted

after he retired he went back to the school and did the timetabling. It was a 10 form per year school

We were nine forms per year, with between 25 and 30 pupils in each form. I can imagine that would be quite a nice thing to do in retirement when you could take your time over it (and know that you wouldn't have to be doing any of the teaching!)

There was no sixth form at my school so at least they didn't have A Levels in the mix.

My area had sixth form colleges. We had a lot of 'study periods' at college and obviously only two years of students taking (mainly) 3 subjects so I imagine that was much easier to timetable than a 5 year school where there must have been up to 20 subjects to juggle.

At my school in the 80s the timetable was prepared for all year groups and then repeated year after year, with minor modifications.

Post-it notes first came to the market in 1980, so probably lots of schools would have had them in the 1980s.

I remember reading somewhere that it was common for the maths teacher to do it which I think is lovely!

@bevelino . I remember at my school, the task was given (nit sure why) to a new teacher. It didn't occur to him to start with the current timetable, rather than from scratch!

Oh, for some reason I thought they were a 90s innovation. That would make life slightly easier then!