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, duty areas, staffing grades, and cover rules once; the system builds daily boards, recomputes when staff are unavailable, and notifies the right people when the board changes.

It works for primary, nursery, secondary, special and school groups. Breakfast and after-school sit on the same daily board as break and lunch.

Problems it solves

• Spreadsheet and Word rotas that cannot recompute when someone is off
• Unclear cover order (for example, leadership should not routinely cover lunch play)
• Multiple concurrent duty areas 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 duty area 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. Sign up (self-serve or operator-provisioned). Local-password owners enrol an authenticator, then configure in the guided setup wizard: staff, duty areas, weekly template, 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 blocking engine (soft clash warnings on Today and week review are supported; see Today board)
• A billing or marketing site (schools sign up at schoolrota.com/signup; operators can also provision tenants manually)
• An automatic publisher: the engine proposes; a duty lead or admin confirms

Next steps

• Sign up and start your trial
• Signing in
• Your first setup
• Key concepts
• Initial setup