Software to allocate after-school clubs

[Ozne]

Does anyone here know if there is some free or low cost software that would help sort out allocating places in after school clubs?

The sort of thing we would like would take into account things like not having one child get into three clubs whilst another gets none at all.

We have been using names in the hat, but it's not working out fairly as some kids are unlucky, especially if the only club they want is a heavily oversubscribed one.

I hope someone can help.

I think this may be a time when human intervention will work better than an app. If you want to manipulate your clubs draw to spread the clubs around, fine, just do it.

If child x gets pulled out of 3 hats , on two of those clubs, pull another name out to replace x.
Our school manipulate club attendees to get siblings doing clubs on same nights, or to encourage a cautious child to try something new with a friend. Or to stop a club being 6 girls and 1 boy.

Thanks Uni. There has been a certain amount of human intervention, but something always seems to get missed, so we are exploring the options on the hope of finding a less fallible system.

Some of the trouble is that it needs to be seen to be fair by parents, and it's hard to explain the fairness of the tweaking.

Why not just limit the clubs you can apply for to 1 or 2 (depending on size of school/no of clubs), with an option to express interest in any others. Any undersubscribed clubs can then be allocated to reserve list people with priority to those who missed out on their main choices. If you don't get your main choice, then you get in next term/half term and those who made it into the very popular club have to sit the next term/half term out. So if 6 spaces for knitting club and 10 people apply, then kids 1-6 go in term 1, 7-10 and two reserve list children in term 2.

I'm sure the only real advantage to having a piece of software is the ability to say "computer says no" to aggrieved parents.

Thanks QQ. They do already apply all sorts of rules to try to be fair.

You have it right about placating irate parents though.

The reason for looking for software is also to try to reduce the staff hours spent on sorting it out every term. It's a lot of hours!

DH and I are planning to write one one day, but no signs of us getting round to it! Very doable for anyone who knows about optimisation or heuristics.

The RAND worksheet function in Excel could help, and save a lot of time pulling names out of hats, but you'd still need some sort of algorithm to solve the problem. Asking children to rank their preferences would also reduce it to a simpler problem, albeit one with more steps.

It's not fair either to say that if a child wants to do a less popular club, they can't do a more popular one.

I suspect whatever way you do it, you will get complaints. The complaint will boil down to "my dc didn't get a place" but someone will always find a way of showing it's unfair.

To me, I'd like to see a system that if a child doesn't get a club one term, then go to the top the next term. But I know some people would disagree with that.

Flomple, let me know if you go for it. I'm sure there would be a market for it.

I looked at some of the mathematics of it and it's way out of my league.

Will check though whether they are at least making use of the rand function and not doing it by hand.

Will do, but don't hold your breath! I would also keep a waiting list and give those disappointed first dibs next time.