TimeTabler

TimeTabler provides school timetabling software and, unusually for the category, an extensive body of training material and methodology alongside it. The vendor has long argued that timetabling is a skill to be learned rather than a task to be automated, and the product reflects that view.

There is real substance to the position. A timetable is not only a valid arrangement but a set of trade offs about which subjects get the best periods, which teachers carry difficult combinations and which year groups are protected, and those are educational decisions that software cannot make on a school's behalf.

The consequence is a product that assists rather than replaces the timetabler. Constraints are entered, conflicts are surfaced and possibilities are explored, but the person doing it retains the decisions, which suits schools where an experienced deputy head has spent years learning what works in that particular building.

Whether that suits a given school depends entirely on whether it has such a person. An institution with a skilled timetabler gains a tool that makes them faster and catches their errors, while one whose timetabler just left gains an application nobody knows how to drive, which is why the training material is a genuine part of the offering.

No pricing was captured. Products in this market are typically licensed per school annually or perpetually, at prices well below what the time saved would justify.