How to Build a Fair Teacher Duty Roster

Monday morning, the staff room. The new duty roster goes up on the board and the first words come at once: “Me again?” If one teacher has three duties this week and another has none, the roster won't look fair however carefully it was made.

After the timetable, the duty roster is the most talked-about list in a school. A good one does two things together: it fills every duty post, and it shares the load fairly between teachers.

The duty roster starts from the timetable

When a teacher can be on duty depends on their timetable. That is why Atlas builds the duty roster on the published timetable. When a new version of the timetable is published, Check Duties shows which duties no longer fit.

1. Duty locations

First you set up the duty locations: corridors, the yard, the entrance, the canteen, with how many teachers each needs per day. Atlas has two kinds:

• All day: the teacher can still teach that day; the duty covers the whole day.
• Timed: duty at a set time; it can't overlap the teacher's lessons.

2. Teacher rules

Each teacher can have their own rules: Exempt from duty, Days duty may never be given, Preferred days, a Fixed duty day, a Fixed duty location and a Preferred duty location. Days closed on the teacher's timetable availability come in here by themselves.

3. General rules

Rules for the whole school:

• The most duties a teacher can get per day and per week.
• Avoid repeating the same day and Avoid repeating the same location.
• Prefer the day with the lightest teaching load: puts duty on the day the teacher teaches least.
• Preferred minimum free lessons: the teacher has a number of free lessons on their duty day. Apply this as a firm rule makes it required.
• Count earlier duties: duties in earlier published rosters are counted, so a teacher who did many last term gets fewer this term.

4. A day with no lessons

Coming in on a day with no lessons only to do duty is one of the most common complaints among teachers. Atlas has a setting for it, A day with no lessons, with three options: Same as any other day, Preferred and No duty.

How the fair share is made

With Share duties evenly on, Atlas builds the roster in two steps. First it finds the fairness ceiling, the highest number of duties anyone should get, starting from the lowest possible number. Then, under that ceiling, it pulls the counts towards each other. So instead of two duties each for two teachers and none for two others, four teachers get one each wherever possible.

Preferences (preferred days, preferred location) are met inside that fairness ceiling. A preference never puts an extra duty on anyone.

When the roster can't be built

If there are more duty posts than the teachers can fill, no roster can be built. Atlas checks this first and says it with numbers: for which day and which location, how many teachers are needed and how many meet the current rules.

After the roster is built

• Make single changes with Change Teacher and Swap. Drag a name onto an empty place to move it, or onto a filled one to exchange.
• A change that breaks a rule is refused, and the rule is named. A change that breaks a preference asks for confirmation.
• Duties you lock are kept when Redistribute the Rest shares out the others again.
• A published roster isn't edited; to change it you make a new draft from its copy.
• Print it on A4 landscape or download it as PDF or Excel, with an optional date, signature line and the duty guidelines text.

Everything the duty roster does is summarised on the teacher duty roster page. How a teacher's day off relates to duty is in the day off post.