A timetable that fits your school, not the other way round

September 3, 2026 · Abdulkareem H. Ali

The summer holiday is over. We hope it was a good one — that the laptop stayed closed for a while, and that the first week back has felt more like a welcome than a wall.

For a timetable coordinator, though, September starts in August. Somewhere in the last fortnight you sat with a grid, a list of teachers and a list of rooms, and made them fit. Today's release of the Tawaasal app is for that fortnight. It is the biggest change to the timetable since we launched, and every part of it removes something you used to work around.

The week starts when your school says it does

Many of the schools we serve teach Sunday to Thursday. Until now the app did not entirely believe them: the working week you set in Settings governed some screens and not others, and somewhere underneath, a weekend was quietly assumed to be Saturday and Sunday.

That assumption is gone. The days you configure now drive every grid: the timetable builder, every teacher's and pupil's week on the web and on the phone, attendance reminders, and the academic calendar's own idea of a working day. A Sunday-first school gets a Sunday-first timetable everywhere, with the right date under each column.

Next term's timetable, without disturbing this one

A timetable is now a set of dated versions. Build next term's, starting on a date you choose, while this term's stays exactly as it is. On any given day one version is in force, and the web and the phone both say which — even when a new one starts mid-week and the two halves of the week come from different versions.

To prepare the next term, copy a version forward and edit only what changes. To fill a parallel class, copy one class's week onto it, with a preview of every clash before anything is written.

Rooms are real things now

A room used to be whatever someone typed into a box. "Room 601", "room 601" and "Rm 601" were three rooms, and none of them knew how many pupils it held.

Each room is now a record with a name, a capacity and a type. The builder warns when a room is booked twice in the same period, and when a class is larger than the room it has been given. Rename a room and every lesson follows. Merge two spellings and their lessons move together. Retire a room and it stays on existing lessons but is not offered for new ones. Nothing has to be re-typed lesson by lesson.

Every class also has a homeroom now, chosen from the school's rooms, and a seating plan with more seats than the room holds is flagged where you would actually see it.

When a teacher is not in

Part-time staff, a standing Tuesday-morning commitment, an afternoon at another site: the builder had no way to know. You can now record when each teacher is not in — whole days or single periods — and the builder warns before it places a lesson there.

Saving an availability pattern lists the lessons, in the current and future timetables, that now fall inside it, so nothing changes silently. And every deliberate override of any clash — teacher, class, room, capacity or availability — is recorded alongside the lesson.

From a spreadsheet, and back to one

If your timetable lives in a spreadsheet, bring it in. One lesson per row (class, day, period, subject, teacher, room), or a workbook with a grid per class, with a downloadable template and day names accepted in any of the app's eleven languages.

The preview lists every problem before anything is written: unknown classes or subjects, days outside your week, duplicate slots, and clashes both with existing lessons and between rows of the file itself. The import is all-or-nothing, so it either lands cleanly or not at all. Export gives you the same file back.

Timetables you can pin to a wall

Class, teacher and room timetables print as branded landscape PDFs — and CSV or Excel — for any date, in your school's day order, mirrored for Arabic, Persian and Urdu. Teachers can print their own.

On the phone

The mobile timetable follows the school week too. Step to any week or pick a date, see the date under each day, jump back to today, and see which timetable version applies to the week on screen. Dates follow the app's language, and English dates are written the British way.

What to do now

If your school is already on Tawaasal, three small things before you build next term:

1. Set your working days in Settings, if you have not already.
2. Add a capacity to each room, so the builder can check class sizes against it.
3. Record teacher availability before you place a single lesson.

Version 2.4.0 is live on the web today, and the iOS and Android updates are submitted and on their way. If you are still deciding whether Tawaasal is for your school, the [Timetable Builder on our features page](/en/features) is a good place to start — and we would be glad to walk you through it.

Welcome back.