Schedule when each class sits each paper, and in which rooms.

Before you start

• The assessment has a start and end date — sittings must fall inside that window. See Assessment windows.
• Your exam rooms have an exam capacity set. See below.

Exam capacity is not teaching capacity

Candidates sit one to a desk with space between them, so a room that teaches 60 may only seat 30 for a paper. Set this under Timetable → Venues, on each room:

• Teaching capacity — the number the room holds for a lesson. Unchanged.
• Exam capacity — seats when the room is used for an exam. Leave it blank and YoShule falls back to the teaching capacity, and the Exam seats column says using room capacity rather than presenting the guess as a declared figure.
• Offer for exams — turn off for a staff room or store you never examine in. It disappears from the exam builder without being deleted, and is badged Not for exams in the venues list.

Rooms, or waves

A class sits a paper once. What varies is how it is spread out.

• A written paper — the whole form sits together, across as many rooms as it takes. Use Add room: the new room copies the same date and time.
• A practical — the lab's workstations decide how many can sit at once, so the form goes through in turns and the slot stretches. Use Add wave: the new session keeps the same room and starts after the previous one, with a changeover gap.

Steps

What is refused, and what is only flagged

Refused — these are real clashes:

• the same room hosting two overlapping sittings;
• a class sitting two papers at once;
• an invigilator in two rooms at once;
• two waves overlapping in the same room;
• a sitting outside the assessment's window.

Flagged, but saved — you may have a reason:

• fewer seats than candidates;
• more candidates in a room than its exam capacity.

Lessons give way

An exam takes the room. Building an exam never asks about lessons, and never blocks on one.

On the day, a lesson whose room is booked for a published exam shows as suspended on My Schedule and on Roll Call, and offers no register — marking a class absent while it sits an exam would put a false attendance failure on record. It runs normally the following week — one exam does not cancel every Tuesday. Editing a lesson whose room has exams coming up saves with a note of the dates.

Publishing

Drafts are visible only to staff who can edit the timetable. Teachers, and parents on the portal, see nothing until you publish.

Once published, the timetable appears on the parent portal under the child's Exams tab — date, time and rooms. It stays visible even for a student whose results are fee-blocked: a child needs it in order to turn up and sit the paper at all, so withholding it would damage the student rather than pressure the payer.

Publishing also fills in the marks-due date for the assessment if it does not have one, working from the last sitting plus the assessment's grace days. YoShule tells you the date it chose. A date you typed yourself is never overwritten.

Only the Dean of Studies, Headteacher or an Admin can publish.

Copying a previous timetable

Rebuilding from scratch every term is the thing this avoids. From the empty state, press Copy a previous timetable, choose the assessment to copy and the new first day.

• Everything arrives as a draft, even if the source was published.
• Dates shift together, so gaps between papers and the spacing of a practical's waves are kept.
• Anything that no longer applies — a paper no longer taught, a room no longer offered for exams, an invigilator who has left — is listed, not dropped quietly.
• It will not copy into an assessment that already has sittings.

Invigilators

Assign them per room. The evening before a published sitting, each invigilator is emailed, and texted if your school has staff SMS on — with the paper, the time and the room. A teacher covering two waves gets told about both.

Printing

Print produces one page per class, A4 portrait, listing date, time, paper and room. Published sittings only.