Subject bottlenecks

Problems can arise if not enough qualified teachers are available to teach certain subjects. Calculating subject bottlenecks makes sense when teachers are qualified to teach more than one subject, which is usually the case.

Let us assume that teacher Gauss is qualified to teach mathematics and physics. His school has quite a few maths teachers but only a few physics teachers. If teacher Gauss has already been allocated so many maths lessons that he has met his target number of periods there could be a bottleneck in physics as there are not so many qualified teachers.

In this case it would make sense to allocate teacher Gauss fewer maths and more physics lessons in exchange.

The 'Subject Bottlenecks' function can be found on the 'Modules' tab, section 'Lesson Planning', 'Teaching qualifications' icon.

this function is used to determine and display the following data for each subject:

•Name: Short name of the subject

•Per: Number of periods that the subject should be taught - for the whole school.

•Open: Number of periods that have no teacher entered - again for the whole school.

•Teachers: Number of teachers for whom a qualification for this subject has been entered.

•Max. available: The total number of vacant periods of all teachers with the qualification for the subject in question. 'Vacant' here means the number of periods that are missing to make up a teacher's target contractual hours.

•Available: This column displays the available periods of the qualified teachers distributed over the open lessons of those subjects for which they are qualified.

•Bottleneck . (Bottleneck index): This column displays a number between 0 (green tick) and 999 (red X), with 0 indicating that there are no bottlenecks in the scheduling of this subject while 999 indicates that the number of available periods of the subject concerned is less than or equal to the number of vacant periods. In this case the available periods in the relevant subjects are highlighted in red. The greater the bottleneck index the tighter the situation is for this subject. It might still be feasible with the available periods, but it makes sense to schedule those subjects with a higher bottleneck index.

Checking selection box 'Only subjects with open lessons' results in only those subjects being displayed for which teachers must still be found.

Checking selection box 'Subject group' results in the subject groups rather than the subjects being displayed.

The list of subject bottlenecks can be printed out by clicking the <Print> button.