Parent-teacher day without the spreadsheet
First come, first served fills the early slots and leaves families waiting an hour between two teachers. Asking families what they need and allocating the evening as a whole does better — here is how to set it up, and what to expect.
A parent-teacher day looks simple on paper: a few hours, a list of teachers, ten minutes each. In practice it is a scheduling problem with three hundred families, forty teachers and a few rooms, and most schools solve it by letting families book whatever slot is still free. That method has a known shape: the teachers families care about most are full within an hour, and the families who booked last spend the evening in the corridor between two meetings.
There is a better way that is not more work for the office: ask families what they need, then plan the whole evening at once.
First come, first served — and what it costs
Booking free slots has two virtues: it is easy to explain, and nobody can complain that the school chose for them. Its costs are less visible:
- The important meetings go to the fastest, not the neediest. The family whose child is struggling in mathematics may find the mathematics teacher fully booked.
- Waiting is scattered. A family with three meetings gets them at 16:00, 17:40 and 19:10, because those were the slots left.
- Siblings are ignored. Two children, two separate evenings' worth of booking.
Ask for needs, not slots
The alternative starts with a different question. Instead of “which slot do you want?”, ask each family:
- which teachers they must see, and which they would like to see;
- when they cannot come.
Teachers say when they cannot do and how many meetings they will take. Teachers can also ask to see a family — often the meetings that matter most are the ones the family would not have booked.
Plan the evening as a whole
With needs in hand, the evening becomes an allocation problem: place every “must” if at all possible, as many “would like” as fit, keep each family's meetings close together, put siblings' meetings back to back, and spread the load across teachers. These goals pull against each other, so they need an order of priority — typically “must” first, then fairness (every family gets at least one meeting), then wishes, then shorter waits.
No one can do that by hand for three hundred families. A solver can, in seconds or minutes, and — just as important — it can say why a request could not be placed: the teacher is away, there is no common free time, the teacher reached their maximum, the room is full.
On a generated test day — 300 families, 40 teachers in two buildings and a hall, eighteen ten-minute slots — our allocator placed 313 of 339 “must see” meetings against 206 with first-free-slot booking, and the average wait between a family's meetings fell from 48 minutes to under 11. It is a synthetic day, not a measured school, but the direction is the point: the evening gets shorter for families without getting longer for teachers.
On the day
- A printed list on each teacher's door, in time order.
- One page per family with all their meetings, siblings together, and the rooms.
- A calendar file families can add to their phone.
- A way for the office to move a meeting by hand to a time that is actually free for both.
How Bildena plans parent-teacher days
Setting up. The school sets the time window, slot length, gaps, breaks, rooms (including several tables in one hall) and the dates when requests open and close. A day can also run the classic way — families book free slots, first come, first served — as can parents' evenings and weekly consultation hours.
Requests. Families mark teachers who teach their child as “must see” or “would like”, up to twelve, and say when they cannot come; adult students ask for their own meetings. Teachers set times they cannot do and their maximum, and can ask to see a family, with a short note.
Allocate. Only school management and the office allocate. Bildena places as many “must see” meetings as possible first, then optimises the rest without losing any of them, then polishes the plan with small moves and swaps. Three presets — balanced, as many meetings as possible, short evenings for families — and an advanced panel with every weight. It runs in the background with progress shown and can be stopped; the same requests give the same plan.
Results and publishing. The result shows “must see” placed, average wait and families without a meeting, each next to what first-free-slot booking would have achieved. Unplaced requests come with their reason. Meetings can be moved by hand to genuinely free times; once published, the family and the teacher are told about any change. Publishing sends each family their whole evening in one notification and each teacher their list; door lists, family pages and calendar files print or download from the plan.
What it does not do. Notifications go by browser push to families with an account; families on paper get the printed page, not an e-mail. How long a run takes on a large real day depends on the requests — the figures above come from a generated test day, not from a school.
A short checklist
- Decide: book free slots, or ask for needs and allocate.
- Limit “must see” and explain what it is for.
- Collect teachers' limits and their own requests before allocating.
- Allocate, read the unplaced list and its reasons, adjust by hand.
- Publish once; after that, change only what has to change.
- Print door lists and family pages; offer the calendar file.
A parent-teacher day will never be short. It can be fair — and for most families, a good deal shorter.
In Bildena, parent-teacher days are planned in the Letters module, next to the letter that invites families to them.
