Departments & Department Meetings

A Department is a named group of teachers plus a set of time slots — it exists to block out shared meeting time (e.g. a weekly Science department meeting) across everyone in that group.

What it needs

• Department Name — unique within your school.
• Member Teachers — the teachers this meeting applies to.
• Meeting Time Slots — the Period(s) when this department meets.

It's a hard constraint

Every member teacher is blocked from teaching during every one of that department's meeting slots — this isn't a preference or a soft nudge, it's enforced exactly like a teacher's own unavailable periods. If a lesson can only possibly be scheduled during a teacher's department meeting slot, generation will come back INFEASIBLE rather than quietly ignoring the conflict.

A teacher who isn't a member of the department is completely unaffected by its meeting slots — they can freely be scheduled then.

Interaction with locked lessons

If a lesson is locked (see Creating Lessons) to a specific period, and that lesson's teacher is a member of a department meeting during that exact period, that's an unresolvable conflict — the solver has no freedom to move a locked lesson elsewhere. It's caught by a quick check before any search for a timetable starts, with a message naming the lesson, the teacher and the meeting (see When generation fails), so it's easy to spot and fix: either unlock the lesson, move the meeting slot, or remove that teacher from the department.

When you don't need this

If your school doesn't have shared department meeting time that needs to be blocked out on the timetable, you don't need to create any Departments at all — it's entirely optional and has no effect on scheduling until you add at least one.