What is SchoolRota?

Who this is for: Everyone new to the product
What you'll achieve: Understand how SchoolRota replaces static duty rotas with a living daily plan

SchoolRota is a multi-tenant duty rota, cover, and same-day staffing platform for schools. Each school gets its own branded portal. You configure day structure, zones, staffing grades, and cover rules once; the system materialises daily boards, recomputes when staff are unavailable, and notifies the right people when the board changes.

Problems it solves

• Spreadsheet and Word rotas that cannot recompute when someone is off
• Unclear last-resort rules (for example, leadership should not routinely cover lunch play)
• Multiple concurrent zones with overlapping time windows
• Same-day sickness cascading across the afternoon
• No audit trail of who published what, and when

Core value

Free office and SLT time from morning firefighting while keeping every zone compliant and every change auditable.

How a typical week works

flowchart LR
  Setup[Configure template] --> Build[Build day or week]
  Build --> Review[Review gaps]
  Review --> Publish[Publish]
  Publish --> Notify[Notify staff]
  Absence[Record absence] --> Recompute[Propose cover]
  Recompute --> Review

1. Configure — branding, zones, weekly template, staff, grades
2. Build — materialise the day from the template and apply absences
3. Review — check compliance (OK / At risk / Gap / Last resort)
4. Publish — lock the day and notify according to your rules
5. Export — download spreadsheet, Word, print/PDF, or calendar files as needed

What SchoolRota is not

• A full teaching-timetable conflict engine (basic class cover and commitments are supported)
• A billing or marketing site (tenants are provisioned by a platform operator)
• An automatic publisher — the engine proposes; a duty lead or admin confirms

Next steps

• Signing in
• Key concepts
• Initial setup