Ask the owner of any language school what they did last Sunday evening and the answer, more often than not, is the timetable. A teacher has handed in notice for the spring term, a B1 teens group has shrunk to three, two families want Tuesday moved to Wednesday, and the room on the first floor is now double-booked because the Saturday exam-prep class grew. None of these is a crisis. All of them, weekly, are the reason timetabling is the operational heart of a language school and the part of the business most owners run in their heads.
This cluster is about getting it out of your head. The three articles below cover building the term timetable, the cancellation and make-up policy that protects it, and scheduling around the teachers you actually have. This page sets out the principles they share, because the principles are what most schools get wrong first: they treat the timetable as a calendar to be filled, when it is a constraint problem to be solved once per term and then defended.
A timetable built by opening an empty grid and filling it with classes will look full and run at sixty percent, because the classes will sit in hours the students cannot attend, taught by teachers who are not free, at levels that cannot fill. A timetable built from constraints outward is less elegant and runs. The constraints are the same in every language school; write yours down before the first slot is placed.
Teacher availability and load. Which hours each teacher can teach, the maximum contact hours per week, and — the one schools forget — how many different levels they are preparing for. Twenty hours across three levels is a job; twenty hours across seven is a resignation in March. Collect availability once per term, in writing, before you plan.
Level cohorts. Each level needs a minimum number of students to run and a maximum to stay a conversation. Decide both numbers now, per level and per format. A class that runs with four students because you did not want to disappoint them is a class that loses money every week for twelve weeks; a class of fourteen is a lecture in which nobody speaks. Six to eight is where most schools land for general language classes, smaller for exam preparation and speaking-heavy groups.
Rooms or video capacity. Physical rooms are finite and so, in practice, is the number of live online classes a school can run well at once, because each needs a teacher and someone who can rescue it when the link fails. A room grid with hours down the side and rooms across the top is the oldest tool in the trade and still the best.
Student windows. This is the constraint that decides everything and the one owners most often ignore. Children and teenagers can attend roughly four to seven on weekdays and Saturday mornings. Working adults can attend early mornings, lunchtimes and evenings from six. University students and the retired are the only groups with daytime flexibility. Those windows are identical for every school in your town, which is why the 4–7pm slot is the scarcest resource you own and why a teacher who can only work mornings is a different hire from one who can work evenings.
The calendar. Term dates, public holidays, the school holidays of the state system your students attend, exam seasons when teenagers vanish for six weeks, and the religious and cultural dates of the communities you teach. A twelve-week course that crosses two public holidays and a mid-term break is a nine-week course. Price it and plan it as one.
The unit of a working timetable is not the class; it is the slot. "B1 teens: Tuesday and Thursday, five to six-thirty" is a fact a parent can plan the family week around, a teacher can rely on, and a marketing page can print. It is the same slot next term, and the term after, whether or not the same students are in it. Schools that move slots during a term to accommodate one family discover that they have inconvenienced three others and taught every family that the timetable is negotiable.
Name slots by level, not by the current group, so that a class can grow, split or merge without confusing anyone: "B1 teens Tue/Thu 5pm" can become two groups next term without renaming. Publish the full term timetable before enrolment opens, with the level, the days, the times, the teacher where possible, and the price. A timetable published after enrolment is a negotiation; one published before is an offer.
The cost of an ad-hoc change is always larger than it looks. Moving one class moves the room, the teacher's day, the invoice for a family paying per term, the sibling who was collected at the same time, and the make-up class that was booked into the now-occupied slot. A change made because a parent asked nicely in week three is the single most common way a well-built timetable falls apart by week six. The rule that saves it is simple: slots change between terms, not during them, and the exceptions are decided by you, not requested by them.
Every language school faces the same decision in the week before term: the A2 adults class has four students and needs six. The three options are to run it at a loss, to merge it with a neighbouring level, or to cancel it and move the four elsewhere. Schools that decide this in the moment choose to run it, because the four students are real and the loss is abstract, and then discover in week eight that they are paying a teacher to deliver a class that costs more than it earns.
Decide the thresholds before enrolment opens and publish them internally: the minimum to run, the point at which a class is offered a merge, the date by which the decision is made, and what a student is offered if their slot does not run. Then the week-before-term conversation is an application of a rule, not a negotiation with yourself. The first article in this cluster works the economics through with numbers.
Waiting lists are the tool that turns this from a loss into a growth signal. A slot that does not fill this term but has a waiting list of three tells you where to put the next teacher. A slot that fills in a day tells you to open a second group at the same time. Keep the list per slot, not per level, because the time is what families are waiting for.
A timetable that survives contact with a real term has a written policy for the three things that will happen to it every week: a student cancels, a student does not turn up, and a teacher is ill. The policy is written before the first booking and announced at the moment the money is taken, because a policy improvised under pressure is always more generous than the one you would have written calmly, and it sets a precedent every subsequent family will cite.
The elements are the same for every school, and the second article sets them out in full with a template: how much notice a student must give, what counts as a make-up and whether make-ups expire, whether a no-show is charged, how a group class differs from a one-to-one, what happens when the teacher is absent, and which events — snow, a public transport strike, a power cut in the building — are nobody's fault and how they are handled. None of it needs to be harsh. All of it needs to be written down.
Teacher absence deserves its own plan, made in September and not on the morning it happens. Which teachers can cover which levels, whether a covered class is taught or postponed, how families are told, and who tells them. A school with a cover list handles a sick teacher in a message; a school without one handles it in a panic and, usually, in a cancelled class that has to be made up in a slot that does not exist.
The test of any timetable system, whether it is a spreadsheet, a wall chart or a platform, is what happens when something changes. A teacher's Thursday moves to Friday: does the teacher's view change, the students' view, the parents' view, the room grid, and the invoice for anyone paying by session — or does someone have to tell each of them, one by one, and remember who they have told? The number of people who have to be told by hand is the number of evenings the timetable costs you.
Teachers need to see their own classes and only their own, with the level, the room or the link, and the roster. Students and parents need to see their classes, their times and what is due, without asking. The office needs to see everything, including the empty slots, because the empty slots are where the next class goes. When those views are the same record seen three ways, a change is made once. When they are three documents, a change is made three times and one of them is wrong.
On SprintUp, the classes, the teachers, the students and the live-class links sit in one campus: a class has a teacher, a level and a roster, and for online sessions the video link is generated by the platform rather than pasted into a message. The solving is still yours — no software knows that your best teacher will not work Fridays — but once solved, the timetable is one record that everyone sees from their own side. The third article goes through what scheduling software has to do for teachers specifically, and the honest list of what it cannot do for you.
Build the timetable, protect it with a policy, and schedule the people who deliver it. Each article is written to be used at the desk with the term in front of you, and each ends with a checklist.