Teacher Substitution App
The twenty minutes every school loses before 8am
Reads the day's timetable, works out who is genuinely free, and allocates cover in a way the staffroom can see is even.
Why we built it
Three teachers call in sick at 7:40am. Someone senior stands in the staffroom with a printed timetable and a pen, working out who is free during period two, who covered twice last week, and who will object. It takes twenty minutes, it happens every single morning, and the person doing it is usually the person with the least time.
It is also invisible work that generates real friction. Cover tends to land on whoever is easiest to find, which over a term is the same handful of people, and everyone in the staffroom knows it even though nobody is tracking it. The fairness complaint is legitimate and there is no data to settle it with.
This app does that one task and nothing else. It reads the timetable, works out who is actually free rather than who appears free, weighs how much cover each person has already taken this term, allocates, and notifies. The deliberate constraint is scope: it is not a school management system, and we have declined to make it one.
Who it is for
Three situations this was designed around
Schools where one person allocates cover manually
If a vice-principal or senior teacher currently does this with a printout, this replaces exactly that task. It is the case the app was designed around and where it pays for itself fastest.
Schools with a fairness problem they cannot evidence
Where staff believe cover is unevenly distributed and there is no record to check. The per-term workload view settles the argument in either direction, which is useful even when the current allocation turns out to be fair.
Schools already running our ERP
It reads the same live timetable and attendance data, so there is nothing to enter twice and availability reflects what is actually happening today rather than what was planned in April.
What it actually does
- Availability worked out, not asked for
- Free periods derived from the live timetable, minus teachers already covering, on leave, or committed elsewhere — the distinction between a nominally free period and a genuinely free one is where manual allocation usually goes wrong.
- Allocation weighted across the term
- Cover counted per teacher over the term, so the allocation spreads rather than repeatedly finding the same agreeable people. Subject match is preferred where the timetable allows it, and the reason for each assignment is visible rather than implied.
- Notification within seconds
- The assigned teacher is pushed the class, the period and the room immediately, so nobody learns about their cover from a colleague in a corridor. Assignments are acknowledged, which gives the office a live picture instead of an assumption.
- Leave requests with a trail
- Absence entered as a request with an approval record, which is what feeds allocation in the first place. The trail exists because 'who approved this' is a question that gets asked later, usually at the worst time.
- Daily and monthly records
- Every allocation retained, producing a per-teacher cover load per month and per term. This is the report that turns a staffroom grievance into a resolvable question.
At a glance
- Allocation driven by the live timetable and real availability
- Push notification to the assigned teacher within seconds
- Leave requests with an approval trail
- Workload balanced across the term, not just the day
- Daily and monthly substitution records for review
Questions we get asked
Do we need the ERP to use this?
No. It can run on its own with the timetable imported directly. It just does less duplicate data entry when the two run together, because it can then read attendance and leave as they happen rather than being told separately.
Can the allocation be overridden?
Always. It proposes and notifies; a human can reassign at any point, and the override is recorded like any other allocation. A system that cannot be overridden by the person responsible for the building would not survive its first genuinely unusual morning.
How does it decide what is fair?
Cover taken per teacher over the term, weighted so that whoever has taken least is preferred, with subject match considered where the timetable allows. The rule is visible in the app rather than hidden, which matters — staff accept an allocation they can see the reasoning for.
What if a teacher does not have the app?
They still appear in allocation and can be assigned; they just receive the assignment through whatever channel the school already uses. Adoption is rarely total on day one and the system should not depend on it being so.
Our other product
See Teacher Substitution App against your own data
Send a sample timetable or fee structure and we will demo with that rather than with a prepared dataset.