Schedule when each class sits each paper, and in which rooms.

Before you start

• The assessment has a start and end date — sittings must fall inside that window. See Assessment windows.
• Your exam rooms have an exam capacity set. See below.

Exam capacity is not teaching capacity

Candidates sit one to a desk with space between them, so a room that teaches 60 may only seat 30 for a paper. Set this under Timetable → Venues, on each room:

• Teaching capacity — the number the room holds for a lesson. Unchanged.
• Exam capacity — seats when the room is used for an exam. Leave it blank and YoShule falls back to the teaching capacity, and the Exam seats column says using room capacity rather than presenting the guess as a declared figure.
• Offer for exams — turn off for a staff room or store you never examine in. It disappears from the exam builder without being deleted, and is badged Not for exams in the venues list.

Rooms, or waves

A class sits a paper once. What varies is how it is spread out.

• A written paper — the whole group sits together, across as many rooms as it takes. Use Add room: the new room copies the same date and time.
• A practical — the lab's workstations decide how many can sit at once, so the group goes through in turns and the slot stretches. Use Add wave: the new session keeps the same room and starts after the previous one, with a changeover gap.

Steps

Press Edit on a sitting to reopen the builder for it. A saved sitting opens read-only; press Edit above the sessions to change its rooms and times. The class and paper are fixed once saved — remove the sitting and add it again to change those.

Knowing what is left

A class sits a paper once, so the job is finished when every paper has a sitting. YoShule counts that for you:

• The assessment picker shows a percentage beside each assessment in the term, so you can see at a glance which timetable is the unfinished one.
• The page header shows n of m papers placed with a progress bar.
• Still to schedule lists every paper that has no sitting yet.

The paper picker in the builder puts outstanding papers first and marks the rest already scheduled — choosing one links you to the sitting that exists rather than failing on save.

Teachers and parents only ever see published work, so for them these counts describe the published timetable.

Grid view

The list answers when does this paper sit. The Grid toggle answers what is this room doing at ten o'clock, which is the question you are really asking while you fit a week of exams into a fixed set of rooms.

• Rows are your exam venues, with their exam seats. A room with a booking still appears even if it has since been taken out of the exam venue list.
• Columns are the windows your school actually uses, gathered from the whole term rather than the day on screen — so moving between days moves the blocks instead of rearranging the grid. Add a time window adds a column for a paper at an unusual hour.
• Arrows and the date box move through the exam period.

The grid shows every exam in the school that day, whichever assessment it belongs to, because a room is taken by whatever is in it. Blocks from other assessments are greyed out and named; they cannot be edited from here. Each block shows the class and paper, the seats, the wave number for a practical, and its invigilators — or Unstaffed where there are none.

Scheduling from the grid

If that class already sits that paper, the dialog says so and adds the room to the existing sitting as another session, instead of trying to create a second one. That is the same thing Add room and Add wave do in the builder — just started from the room you wanted.

You need an assessment selected to schedule. With All assessments chosen the grid is a read-only picture of what the rooms are doing.

What is refused, and what is only flagged

Refused — these are real clashes:

• the same room hosting two overlapping sittings;
• a class sitting two papers at once;
• an invigilator in two rooms at once;
• two waves overlapping in the same room;
• a session that ends before it starts;
• a sitting outside the assessment's window.

Flagged, but saved — you may have a reason:

• fewer seats than candidates;
• more candidates in a room than its exam capacity.

Lessons give way

An exam takes the room. Building an exam never asks about lessons, and never blocks on one.

On the day, a lesson whose room is booked for a published exam shows as suspended on My Schedule and on Roll Call, and offers no register — marking a class absent while it sits an exam would put a false attendance failure on record. It runs normally the following week — one exam does not cancel every Tuesday. Editing a lesson whose room has exams coming up saves with a note of the dates.

Publishing

Drafts are visible only to staff who can edit the timetable. Teachers, and parents on the portal, see nothing until you publish.

Once published, the timetable appears on the parent portal under the child's Exams tab — date, time and rooms. It stays visible even for a student whose results are fee-blocked: a child needs it in order to turn up and sit the paper at all, so withholding it would damage the student rather than pressure the payer.

Publishing also fills in the marks-due date for the assessment if it does not have one, working from the last sitting plus the assessment's grace days. YoShule tells you the date it chose. A date you typed yourself is never overwritten.

If papers are still unscheduled, YoShule names the number and asks you to confirm before publishing. It does not stop you — schools do release exam timetables in stages — but the unscheduled papers stay off the timetable until you add them and publish again.

Only the Dean of Studies, Headteacher or an Admin can publish.

Copying a previous timetable

Rebuilding from scratch every term is the thing this avoids. From the empty state, press Copy a previous timetable, choose the assessment to copy and the new first day.

• Everything arrives as a draft, even if the source was published.
• Dates shift together, so gaps between papers and the spacing of a practical's waves are kept.
• Anything that no longer applies — a paper no longer taught, a room no longer offered for exams, an invigilator who has left — is listed, not dropped quietly.
• It will not copy into an assessment that already has sittings.

Invigilators

Assign them per room, on each session in the builder or in the grid's schedule dialog. The star marks the chief invigilator; the first person you add takes it until you move it.

The list is ordered by the availability held in HR → Staff, and by how much each person is already carrying that day, so the obvious choice is at the top and the load spreads without anyone counting:

• Available — the window falls inside the hours they work on that day.
• Outside their hours — offered anyway, with the reason (Not available on Wednesdays, Available 12:00–17:00 on Wednesdays). Hours are held per day, so the reason names the day the sitting falls on.
• Hours not set — offered anyway. Nobody is hidden for missing HR data; on the morning of a paper you assign whoever is there.
• Already invigilating — the only one you cannot pick, because a person in two rooms at once is refused on save regardless.

Set someone's working hours under HR → Staff to move them up the list.

The evening before a published sitting, each invigilator is emailed, and texted if your school has staff SMS on — with the paper, the time and the room. A teacher covering two waves gets told about both.

Printing

Print produces one page per class, A4 portrait, listing date, time, paper and room. Published sittings only.