Teacher Deployment

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VIDEO SIX: TEACHER DEPLOYMENT
The video illustrates the idea of teacher deployment using a simplified hand drawn representation of a spreadsheet. These
notes refer to screenshots from the actual spreadsheet itself.

The idea of teacher deployment is to list the number of teacher periods allocated to different areas of the school
curriculum to account for all available teacher periods. The method was originally devised to analyse the deployment of
teacher time across an existing timetable in order to make fair comparisons between different schools. It originates from
ideas proposed by T.I. Davies in School Organisation1 and has been used by Keith Johnson2 and others since.

Some software still uses aspects of the original Davis approach which was to cost the timetable in ‘curriculum units’ (for
reference a curriculum unit was defined as ‘one ninth of the teaching week ie the cycle). Alongside this idea, the teacher
deployment analysis was called ‘staff deployment’ despite the fact it only referred to teaching staff. It also used an obscure
approach called ‘bonus’ to attempt to compare different schools to a common arbitrary baseline.

It is perfectly possible to adapt the idea and use it as a planning tool, rather than as a retrospective analysis tool. It is also
possible to avoid the use of curriculum units and ideas of bonus by using teacher periods and a statistic called average
class size’ . The detail of average class size is not essential for the process of planning a curriculum within budget and
members of the finance and wider school leadership team have no need to use the idea unless they wish to go into a
greater level of detail as indicated in the ‘Equation of Life’ chapter.

Screen shot 1: primary school working in half days hence a cycle of 10 periods:

figure 15

Screen shot 2: secondary school working with a 25 period cycle:

figure 16

The teacher deployment sheets are labelled Curriculum Base year, Curriculum Year 1, Curriculum Year 2, etc. on the
workbook tabs and these terms will be used from this point on. The top of the two sheets are shown in figures 15 and 16.
Basic data comes from other sheets in the workbook. As indicated earlier, most is for information only. The critical number
is in cell B3 which is the budget for that year’s curriculum plan expressed in teacher periods.

Considering the primary school, it has year groups and roll numbers as shown below and decides to allocate the number
of teacher periods shown in column C.

A single class taught for the full week (= cycle) needs 10 tp where 1 tp represents half a day’s teaching in this school.

In the notes column, the number of classes that will be allocated to each year group are indicated.

1 Davis, T.I., School Organisation, Pergamon 1969

2 Johnson K., Timetabling, Hutchinson 1980
Linking revenue to the timetable - Teacher Deployment | 2
figure 17

In some primary schools, classes are formed from more than one chronological year. There are several ways of doing this
in the spreadsheet. One way is to insert an additional column between B and C and use it to enter combined totals of
pupils from column B and to edit the year group area titles in column A accordingly.

In the secondary school shown in figure 18, the curriculum is more complex and this is reflected in the NOTES column.

figure 18

As an example, on line 15 for Year 7, the notes indicate 8 groups for 23 periods. How these are organised is not relevant.
For instance the school might split the year group into two bands and have four sets in some subjects and four linear class
groups in other subjects (see the timetable terms section later on for definitions). It does not matter; the overall effect
is to have eight teaching groups at any one time across the whole year group. For the remaining part of the week, the
year is organised into 12 groups for two periods, probably for technology. These sort of groupings are easy to see on the
curriculum plan but can be very difficult to tease out from an actual timetable since the 12 groups may well be organised
as four blocks each with three groups, and these four blocks may be timetabled so that when any one of them is on in the
actual timetable there are six other classes from the eight classes across the year section.

The total teacher period allocation to this year group is 208tp because 8×23=184tp, 12×2=24tp and 184+24=208tp.

In both these examples, the number of teacher periods allocated to any particular area is represented in terms of the
number of FTE teachers the school has to employ to cover the tp requirement in that area. This is shown in column D. The
calculation is done by dividing the tp allocation by the Average Load shown in B6 on the earlier diagrams.

Foot of primary spreadsheet:

figure 19

Linking revenue to the timetable - Teacher Deployment | 3

Foot of secondary spreadsheet:

figure 20

Lines 23, 24 and 25 allow the allocation of teacher periods to Learning Support and Intervention activity and also to be
held back for timetable flexibility.

Any unallocated tp are shown on line 27. The aim is for the total here to be zero. If the school allocates more tp than are
available, it in effect goes into budget deficit unless the contact ratio of staff is increased or the number of groups in
the curriculum is reduced. In this case, the background in cell C27 turns red as a result of the conditional formatting rule
applying to that cell.

In terms of the flow chart the school is now following the ‘Not feasible’ and ‘Revisit’ route.

The ‘Curriculum Year 3’ pages in the spreadsheets as supplied shows the effect of using more tp than are available.
The aim of the process is to set up three curriculum sheets for the coming years all of which are within the planned
budget. At this point the timetable team need to check further feasibility issues using such techniques as schematic
plans and combing charts. Some of the staff names used could be Another OneMaths, Another TwoHistory. This does not
matter, the feasibility can still be checked. In case of a problem, the school is back on the revisit route.

It is almost certain, particularly with regard to the future years that information and input data will change. In that case the
workbook needs updating and changes may be necessary to the curriculum pages.

Linking revenue to the timetable - Teacher Deployment | 4

 Linking revenue to the timetable

Summarise key data for a known year

Project data for 3 to 5 years

Then... for each year...

Apply the rule of thumb to

find the FTE teacher estimates

Use contact ratio to find the timetable

budget in teacher periods (tp)

Use teacher deployment to find

the curriculum cost envelopes in tp

Check for timetable feasibility Revisit

Revisit Feasible Not feasible

Is there a significant
Yes
change in the estimates?

No

Plan staff appointments

and timetables
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