Tag: GHC

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Optimising the management of absences and substitutions in schools

Teacher absence can be an organisational challenge for any school. Coordinating substitutions efficiently is essential to avoid disruptions in teaching and ensure an optimal learning experience for students.

Digital solutions have transformed this management, enabling an agile and efficient response to any eventuality.

Common challenges in absence management

  • Identification of absences and availability of supply teachers: it may be difficult to know which teachers are absent and who is available to replace them without an adequate platform.
  • Selection of the most suitable substitute: choosing the teacher best suited to the subject, level of education and teaching load can be a slow and imprecise process.
  • Timely communication of absences and substitutions: promptly informing all stakeholders is key to avoid confusion and ensure continuity of learning.

Automation and digitalisation as a solution

With GHC Web App, schools can manage absences in an automated and efficient way, reducing the administrative workload and optimising response times.

Key benefits of the GHC Web App

  • Streamlined registration of absences: teachers report their absence in seconds, facilitating immediate management.
  • Intelligent allocation of substitutes: the software proposes options based on the availability and teaching load of each teacher.
  • Instant notifications: all stakeholders receive real-time updates, minimising errors.
  • Detailed analysis and reporting: it facilitates decision making with historical data on absences and substitutions.

Optimised management for seamless education

Adopting technological tools for absence management improves the operational efficiency of schools and maintains the quality of learning. With GHC Web App, school organisation becomes smoother, ensuring that each class continues as planned.

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Plan timetables with flexible class units up to 9 hours per day

The timetable planning in educational institutions is a constant challenge that we face thanks to your collaboration. Considering your requests, in order to facilitate this complex task, GHC offers a key improvement in its functionality: the possibility of planning the class units of each subject with a flexible weekly distribution, being able to have up to 9 consecutive hours in the same day.

Use for VET institutions

VET institutions require vocational modules with weekly distributions using large blocks, which are difficult to fit into the timetable. Many of their modules require blocks of practical or theoretical classes. GHC allows you to create optimised timetables, ensuring that students receive their training in class units of the most appropriate length within the possible combinations.

It is important to highlight that in order to find the best solutions for VET vocational modules using multi-duration blocks, it is usually necessary to provide the solutions with flexibility for their weekly distribution, as otherwise rigid blocks can easily prevent results or make them too strict for optimisation.

In this way, establishments can:

  • Adjust the duration of the class units of the training modules within each day with a maximum and minimum duration.
  • Optimise the use time of classrooms, laboratories or specialised workshops for practical classes.
  • Coordinate the FCT (Workplace Training), allowing the school timetable to be adapted to the availability of collaborating companies.
  • Reduce or avoid empty intervals in timetables of teachers and students.

Use for primary schools

Providing a flexible weekly distribution for the class units of each subject in primary schools can also be very useful if the timetable framework used contains intervals with a split duration. That is, half-hour or three-quarter-hour periods, together with one-hour class unit. In such cases, it can be very difficult to decide a priori the length of the class units over which the weekly load of each subject is to be distributed. It is often not possible for schools to divide each subject into split periods, so that the timetables can be resolved in such a way as to allow for the following.

Both to set up class units with a duration longer than 5, and to provide flexibility in the weekly distribution of multiple duration class units, this option is very useful.

A powerful and adaptable tool

Thanks to the possibility of scheduling class units for each subject with a flexible weekly distribution, GHC allows managers to create adjusted timetables considering legal restrictions, but also other flexible criteria such as resource availability and teachers’ preferences.

Experience the intuitive and powerful interface offered by the GHC planner, and launch the optimisation engine to make creating and adjusting timetables as quick and easy as possible.

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Automatic search for changes to the timetable

It is very common that, once the timetables have been submitted, it is necessary to make changes due to new requirements. Many of you have asked us for a process to automatically search for the best solutions when there are changes to the timetable. Of course, the best results will be found by planning the constraints and looking for a new solution from the beginning, but this is sometimes not possible if the timetables are already effective.

From the editor it is possible to create or modify the class units by adding reinforcements, splittings, etc. The GHC editor is a very flexible tool and the process of recombining solutions increases its power considerably.

This process allows the timetable of particular teachers or groups of students to be modified as necessary by finding the best alternatives, while preventing the rest of the timetable from being altered. It also allows you to modify the prohibited positions in the particular templates of some or other elements so that the solutions found will be adapted to the new requirements.

Thanks to this new functionality of the GHC editor, you will be able to search automatically and in an assisted way for combinations that meet new requirements arising from previously adopted timetables.

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How to collect the information to create your timetable

Drawing up timetables is a task that involves a large number of people, from the head of studies to the heads of department and other teachers at the school. A variety of information has to be gathered: the subjects that each teacher will teach to each group of students, the times at which they can or prefer to teach their class units, or the classroom where they wish to teach.

In times of pandemic covid-19 online tools avoid face-to-face meetings, making it easier to organise them, as well as favouring social distancing and the prevention of infections. Therefore, finding a tool that allows online collection of all the information necessary to obtain valid and optimal schedules is essential. But what are the main functionalities that these tools should meet?

  • Allowing the division of work into departments. The insertion of this data should be possible online and in parallel, giving each department independence, and speeding up the compilation of all the information.
  • Defining the teacher who will teach each subject. Each educational institution has certain criteria for assigning teachers to each subject and course. The software chosen must allow each teacher to be associated with the class units he/she will teach in accordance with these criteria.
  • Recording the availability of each teacher’s timetable. A teacher may have a reduction in the number of hours worked, may teach in another school, or may prefer to have part of his or her timetable free. Collecting all these restrictions and preferences is crucial in order to obtain a good timetable.
  • Collecting other preferences about the teaching staff. Gathering the preferences of the teachers will allow us to know their needs, and thus obtain a good schedule that satisfies them. Knowing which teachers want to be tutors or do on-call hours will increase the satisfaction of the teaching staff with the timetable.
  • Specifying details about the class units. Doing this process online should not be a handicap to the quality of the process. Therefore, indicating the classroom where a class unit should or is preferred to be held, or suggesting the weekly distribution of class times for each subject is necessary during data entry.

The Peñalara collection of preferences tool not only covers all these functionalities, but goes further. If you wish, it allows each head of department to take charge of the creation of the class units of his/her department, in order to free the head of studies from this task, and to speed up and distribute the work among more people. In addition, this web application is fully integrated with GHC, both to publish the timetable so that the heads of department can work with it, and to collect the data that they have entered. Thanks to this, we can achieve better schedules and save time.

You can find information about it in these video tutorials, go to the Peñalara website for more information, or sign up for any of the weekly demos.