Free Exam Management for Boarding Schools That Live, Study, and Sit Exams on the Same Site

Day-school products assume candidates go home in the evening, so they ignore weekend slots, prep clashes, and dorm-supervision overlap. A boarding school needs the timetable to know that a Saturday-morning mock is fine but Sunday leave is sacred, and it needs invigilation rotas drawn from house-masters who are already on duty. OpenEduCat lets you encode those constraints once and reuse them every term, and the same engine handles a thirty-pupil sixth form alongside a five-hundred-pupil senior school without rewriting the rules.

Yes. The scheduler treats evening and weekend slots as first-class options and pulls the duty house-master rota from the residential module so the on-duty adult is offered as an invigilator first. Coordinators can also blacklist times such as Sunday morning chapel or the Saturday inter-house match, so the timetable never asks for a venue that is already in use.

It does. The exam rota shares a calendar with the boarding-house duty rota, so a house-master on a night shift is not booked to invigilate a 9am paper they cannot realistically attend. The system also surfaces double-booked staff before publication and lets matron or the deputy head approve overrides with a logged reason.

OpenEduCat lets your exam officer import the published Cambridge International, IB Diploma, and Pearson Edexcel session timetables, link candidate numbers to centre numbers, log seating in the format each board requires, and export forecast and final entries in the CSV layouts those awarding bodies accept. Incident reports follow the candidate handling rules in each board's exam officer handbook.

Housemasters can flag candidates as high-stress or under safeguarding plan, and the exam dashboard surfaces those candidates to the duty invigilator and matron before each sitting. Rest-break, separate-room, and prompter arrangements run through the same flagging, and the module logs welfare touchpoints during the exam window so a Designated Safeguarding Lead can review them under Ofsted National Minimum Standards for Boarding Schools, the ISI boarding handbook, and the candidate-care guidance each external board issues to centres.

The invigilator marks the session as paused with a one-tap incident log that captures candidate count, time, and the reason for pausing. Once safe, the system can extend the session by the elapsed minutes, generate the board-compliant incident report Cambridge International, IB, and Edexcel require, and notify house-masters so they can confirm every boarder is accounted for before scripts resume.