A Term Timetable in Minutes, Not a Weekend

The timetable is one of the hardest documents a school produces all year. It looks simple (a grid of periods against days), but building it is a puzzle. Every class needs its subjects the right number of times a week. Every teacher can only be in one room at a time. Some subjects want a lab, some want the morning, some run as a double. Move one thing and you've double-booked somebody three cells away.

So it gets built the hard way: a big sheet of paper or an Excel file, a quiet week before term, and a lot of squinting to make sure Mrs. Adeyemi isn't somehow teaching two classes at once on Tuesday.

It doesn't have to be that week anymore.

Tell Minerva the shape of your week

You start by describing your school, not by drawing cells. Your bell schedule (periods and their times, short break, long break, assembly), set once. How many periods a week each subject gets per class. Which subjects run as options (a class where some pupils take CRS and others IRS, in the same slot). Rooms, if you use them. Part-time teachers' unavailable days, if any.

Most of this Minerva already knows from your term setup, so it's mostly review.

Then press Generate

Minerva places every period for every class, filling the grid, respecting your rules, and refusing to put any teacher in two places at once. A large school with dozens of classes and teachers is done in minutes, and what you get back is a working draft, not a blank page.

If your setup can't quite fit (say a teacher is assigned more periods than the week physically has), Minerva doesn't fail silently or shrug. It tells you in plain words exactly what couldn't be placed and why, so you know precisely what to adjust. No mystery, no hunting.

Adjust it like it's yours, because it is

The generated timetable is a starting point, and it's fully yours to shape. Drag a lesson to a better slot. Pin the periods you're sure about and re-generate the rest around them. Swap two classes. Every change is checked live, so if a move would clash, you see it the moment it happens, highlighted, with the reason. It's the difference between the machine doing the heavy lifting and you keeping the judgement.

When it's right, you publish it. That's the moment it becomes real for everyone else.

Everyone sees exactly their slice

A published timetable isn't a file you email around and hope people find. It reaches each person as their view, automatically:

• Teachers get their own week (where to be, which class, which room), and a "now and next" glance on their phone, so the day's schedule is one tap away.
• Parents and pupils see their class's timetable, with the option subjects already resolved to the ones that child actually takes.
• Admins and heads see the whole picture: every class, every teacher, room by room, and a teacher-load report that shows at a glance who's carrying what.

And when you want it on the wall, Minerva prints it: clean, branded, one page per class, or the whole school in a single PDF. The classic Nigerian wall timetable, without touching Excel.

Built once, carried forward

Next term, you don't start over. When you initialise a new term, Minerva can bring your timetable setup forward (your teaching loads and subject options), ready to generate again. The hard thinking is done once; every term after is a few minutes.

A timetable used to cost a school a week of somebody's life, every single term. Now it costs a few minutes and a Generate button, and it's clash-free, on the wall, and in every hand that needs it.

Automatic timetabling is live in Minerva now. Request a demo to see it built for your school.