Tools to

Start of the school year

The August week: build the timetable, seat the exams, set up the registers and get the letters out.

10 tools · 7 free with no account · 3 free to try with one

The school year starts with a fortnight of work that is entirely front-loaded and mostly done by one or two people with a spreadsheet. Two jobs dominate — the timetable and, once exams come round, the seating — and both are the kind of problem a computer is good at and a person is not.

Everything here reads the sheets a school already keeps: the subject allocation, the class list, the room list. Nothing about a pupil or a member of staff is uploaded.

The timetable

Allocation in, clash-free week out.

School Timetable Generator — Free OnlineGive it the subject allocation — class, subject, teacher, periods a week — and get a clash-free timetable: a grid for every class, a grid for every teacher, double periods kept together, teacher free days honoured, and a plain list of anything that would not fit. Runs in your browser; no staff names are uploaded.Free

Exams

Seating that no invigilator can argue with.

Exam Seating Plan Generator — Free OnlineSeat a whole exam from a student list and a set of rooms: no two of the same class side by side, classes alternating down a column or across a row, every n-th seat left empty. Download the plan as a workbook, a chart for every room door and an attendance sheet per room. Runs in your browser.Free Exam Countdown & Study Planner — Free OnlineDays left until your exam, how many of them are study days, and the hours a day your syllabus actually needs to fit in them.Free

Setting up

Lists, registers and the first letters home.

Merge & Dedupe Spreadsheets — Free OnlineCombine up to ten Excel or CSV files into one sheet — columns matched by heading, rows stacked — then remove duplicates on the columns you choose, with every removed row listed by source file and row. Runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.Free Letter Mail Merge to PDF — Free OnlineWrite one letter with {{Name}}-style placeholders, drop a spreadsheet of recipients, and download a PDF for each row — zipped, and as one combined file for printing. Runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.Free Parent Communication Writer — AI for BusinessThe message home, written properly — absence, progress, behaviour, fees, trips, exams, closures — in the shape of the channel you are sending it on, and in a second language if the family reads one more easily.Free to try Certificate Generator — Free & PrivateCreate certificates of completion, achievement or attendance — one, or a batch from a name list.Free

Ready for the first assessment

So December is not another fortnight.

Report Card & Marksheet Generator (PDF) — Free OnlineTurn a class marks spreadsheet into a printed report card for every student — subject grades, total, percentage, rank and the class average — as one PDF each in a ZIP, one combined PDF for printing, and a results workbook. Runs in your browser; no marks are uploaded.Free Question Paper Generator — AI for BusinessA full question paper from your blueprint — sections, general instructions, marks against every question — with a separate marking scheme that gives the model answer and where each mark is earned.Free to try Marking Rubric & Assessment Criteria Builder — AI for BusinessA marking rubric for a task you set — criteria against bands, with descriptors that actually tell a 7 from a 5, the marks allotted to each criterion, and a note on what a top answer does.Free to try

Frequently asked questions

What does the timetable need from me?

The subject allocation your school already writes: one row per class, subject, teacher and periods a week. Column names are matched for you. Teachers’ unavailable days and fixed periods like assembly go in two text boxes.

How long does it take?

Seconds. The worked example — four classes, eleven teachers, a hundred and forty periods — settles in well under a second, and you can change the seed to get a different arrangement of the same allocation.