Study halls and supervised study (primary and secondary)

Study halls (or supervised study) are periods during which students who have no lesson are hosted in a study room under supervision. They are a typical institution of French middle and high schools: students who do not take the elective running on a slot, those exempt from PE, those whose teacher is absent.

Why not just a regular course?

A study hall is not managed exactly like a course:

• no subject in the usual sense,
• a changing audience from one time slot to the next (whoever has no lesson),
• supervision rather than teaching — the supervisor does not teach, they supervise,
• a strong demand for fairness: the supervision load must be distributed among the teachers (and pastoral staff / monitors) according to a fairness rule.

This is why Omniscol offers the dedicated Staffing module for this type of management. See Overview of the Staffing module. This module is an account option: without it, model study halls with a study group (section below); the supervision grid itself belongs to the module.

Modeling with the Staffing module

Study halls translate into duty grids:

• a weekly grid of the time slots where students can be in study hall,
• for each time slot, one or more supervision tasks (depending on the number of students expected and the desired monitor / student ratio),
• assignment of the monitors (education assistants, or teachers with the Staff role) to each task.

See Building a service grid and Assigning staff.

Link with student timetables

When a student has no lesson on a time slot (their class is on an elective or half of the class is in a lab), their individual timetable simply shows a free slot: Omniscol does not automatically display a "Study hall" lesson there.

To make the study hall appear in the timetable of the students concerned, create a study hall course for the group that has no lesson on that slot, with the study room — this is the 4A-Étude group pattern described in Half classes and electives in class divisions. Supervision coverage, for its part, is handled on the Staffing side — see Overview of the Staffing module.

Supervised study vs free study

A useful distinction:

• Supervised study — a supervisor is present, students work in silence. The classic case for Staffing.
• Free study (common room, self-directed work space) — no dedicated supervisor, simply a place where students can wait. No need for Staffing: model it as a dedicated room; a classroom specialisation can, if needed, prevent ordinary courses from being placed there (without reserving the room for the study hall itself, which has no subject). See Classroom specialisations.