Teacher availability and time constraints

A teacher's availability tells the software which time slots are impossible, undesirable or preferred for them. The solver strictly respects the impossibilities and tries to optimize the other preferences. In secondary education these are also called wishes — the same concept.

Four levels

An unmarked range is neutral — available with no preference.

Enabling availability entry

The entry mode is chosen in the general settings, on the Teachers' availability setting:

• Disabled — no availability entry by teachers.
• Weekly — availability entered on a typical week. For weekly and cyclic timetables.
• Calendar — availability entered date by date. For calendar timetables, on Premium accounts.
• Calendar + Weekly — both entry modes coexist, on Premium accounts, when recurring and calendar timetables live side by side, or simply to give teachers a simpler way to state that they are never available on a given day of the week, whatever the date (exceptions can still be entered).

Entry by teachers themselves

Teachers can enter their own availability from their account . A major time saver for the administration.

If the school prefers that the teacher not sign in, you can also send them a direct share link to their own availability screen, in edit mode, generated from Download with an expiration date. The teacher enters their availability even if their account has no sign-in permission.

In practice, this link is often sent in a personalized message with the planned subjects, the hour volume, travel or specific constraints, and an explicit deadline. Omniscol does not provide a dedicated mail merge for this case: each link slots into the communication already prepared for the corresponding teacher.

Administrative validation in the timetable

In a weekly timetable:

• Availability entered by the teacher is by default pending validation.
• The planner checks and validates (potentially after edits — for example removing an availability entry that is too restrictive, or turning black into red).
• Any later change by the teacher goes back to pending.

In secondary education, availability entry can be opened several weeks before planning. Entries are thus made on a generic time grid, and the validation phase adapts them to the timetable's actual lesson time grid: the validation phase also serves to carry out this transposition correctly.

Availability of virtual teachers is saved directly. This makes it possible, for example, to grant Wednesday off by default.

In calendar mode (Premium):

• Availability is consolidated in real time.
• Conflicts are detected directly.

In calendar mode, the grid is indeed considered less constrained (since there are many possible dates), and teachers are autonomous — sometimes external to the school, juggling positions and responsibilities: this is not a wish but actual availability.

As an exception, teacher availability data in calendar mode can therefore be edited both from the administration module's screen and from a timetable.

Availability conflicts at generation

If a teacher's availability is too restrictive to allow their lessons to be positioned, generation fails with an explicit diagnostic. See Diagnosing a failed generation.

Solutions:

• Relax the availability (turn a range red rather than black).
• Redistribute the courses (a teacher with 18 hours and only 12 free slots cannot make it work).
• Recruit (extreme case — but sometimes it is the right diagnosis).