Timetable Management for Preschools — Rotational Care, Not Class Periods

K-12 timetabling solves a constraint problem: fit subjects, teachers and rooms into 40-minute periods across a week, minimising clashes. Preschool has none of that. There are no subjects, no periods, no bells and the same educators stay with the same room of children all day. What preschool needs instead is a care rhythm — a repeating daily rotation of free play, meals, naps and outdoor time — held together by staff-to-child ratios and a consistent key-person. Treating preschool as 'school but younger' is the most common reason early-years software fails in the field.

Yes. Each room has a configured ratio (for example 1:4 for under-2s under NAEYC guidance, 1:3 for under-2s under EYFS in the UK, or the National Quality Standard ratios under ACECQA in Australia). The timetable checks every block against the rostered educators present at that moment — including their breaks — and warns the director before the day starts if any block would breach. If an educator calls in sick, the system recalculates and flags which blocks now need cover.

Every outdoor block has a paired indoor B-plan — gross-motor play in the hall, a movement-based circle time, water play under cover, or sensory bins. The morning director switches the block with one tap when the local weather or air-quality check fails the threshold (rain, temperature out of range, AQI above the room's policy). The change pushes instantly to every educator tablet and to the parent app, so families are not turning up with rain boots that the child will not need.

Because they are not negotiable, biologically or operationally. A toddler's nap window is narrow; miss it and the afternoon falls apart. Meals are tied to kitchen prep, allergen plating, and bottle warming schedules. Locking these blocks means the system will refuse — not just warn against — scheduling a parent tour, a music vendor or a staff meeting on top of them. Directors can override with a reason code, but the default is protection, not flexibility.

Two ways. A printed daily-flow sheet sits at the room door so parents can scan it at drop-off and pick-up — the old paper habit, kept on purpose because it works. In parallel, the parent app shows the live rotation for their child's room, threaded with their child's individual events: nap start and end, what they ate, nappy changes, any incident notes. Parents see the day, not the spreadsheet.

A key-person is the one educator primarily responsible for a specific child — their settle-in, intimate care moments (nappies, feeding, comfort), and the daily handover with parents. The model comes out of attachment research and is formalised in frameworks like EYFS. The timetable stores each child's key-person, keeps the pairing visible on the daily rotation, and warns when a key-person is rostered off during a child's settle-in week or first days back from absence — the moments where consistency matters most.