My old secondary school principal once said: "if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there". For the past few years, we have used the first day of the school year as an opportunity to share our vision for the school year and to get buy-in from staff. We were fortunate our school review took place at the end of 2019 and provided us with some solid feedback and a clear direction about where we needed to focus our energy and efforts for 2020.

Not that I have ever managed a public transport system, but I imagine that co-ordinating the comings and goings of teachers and their replacement staff must be a bit like managing trains. The whole system needs to run like clockwork or else it comes to grinding halt and plunges the world into chaos. (And there have certainly been times where it has near plunged into chaos!)

I am fortunate that my school isn’t too large but I can only image what it must be like for larger schools. Below is my process for managing staff absences and replacement staff.

One of my first tasks when I became Assistant Principal was to create the timetable. Nobody ‘teaches’ you how to do a timetable or what you need to think about when you do it, so for me, it was initially a steep learning curve on top of everything else I was trying to get my head around. I hope that this post and the resources below help you if you are taking on the challenge of timetabling for the first time.

Backstreet's back!.... And so is my blog.It’s hard to believe that this blog has been around for 10 years. During that time, it has had a few attempted reboots.

So, why try again?

Since starting this blog, I have certainly grown and shifted locations and roles; moving from classroom teacher, teaching ICT (Digital Technologies), leading teaching and now into my current role as an assistant principal. I noticed that there is an abundance of resources online for teachers, but resources for school leaders and principal class were quite limited and often US or UK focused.