Sorry — one more thing about Max
So sorry to add to your list. Max has been moved into the Tuesday intervention group, which is the same slot as his lesson. Is there any chance of something later in the day? Completely understand if not.
14 days free · no card needed
A whole term of rotating timetables. Sorted in minutes.
No spreadsheet. No Word table. No rebuilding it by hand when one parent asks to move a lesson.
Built for peripatetic music teachers who visit several schools a week.
The problem
The timetable is never quite finished.
Every term starts with the same puzzle. PE. School trips. Assemblies. Breaks. Mixed lesson lengths. Shared lessons. Cooking club every Monday afternoon. GCSE and A level pupils who can only do break or after school.
Then someone, inevitably, remembers an important detail just after you’ve sent it.
Of course they did. Parents are busy, schools are busy, things change — and as a peripatetic teacher you’re working around a timetable that isn’t entirely within your control.
But one change means back into the spreadsheet, then back into the Word table you actually send home, exporting a new PDF, checking it twice, crossing your fingers and hitting send again.
The requests are reasonable. The juggling is relentless.
Quick question about Thursdays
Nothing urgent at all. Louise mentioned her lesson has moved again this term and she’s worried about missing the start of Geography. Could you let me know roughly what time she’ll be out?
Year 11 mocks — timetable changes
Morning. Just to flag that Year 11 mocks run from the 17th, so the hall and three practice rooms are out of use for that fortnight. Happy to help find alternative spaces if you let us know what you need.
Could Caroline and Kendrick share?
Caroline has asked whether she could share her lesson with Kendrick — they’re in the same class and both keen. I know it might not work with the timings, so no pressure either way.
Joe has moved to the later bus
Quick one — Joe is now on the 3:40 bus rather than the 3:10, so an end-of-day slot actually works better for him from here on. Sorry for the change; the bus timetable moved, not us.
Max — agreed support window
Following Max’s review we’ve agreed he shouldn’t be taken out during morning break, and it’s in his plan now. Anything in the afternoon is fine and we’ll make sure he’s collected on time.
Me again, sorry! Cooking club
Apologies for the second email. Louise has signed up for cooking club, which runs 3:15 to 4:15 on Thursdays. Would an earlier slot be possible, or shall we leave things as they are?
INSET day added — 12 November
Please note an additional INSET day has been added on 12 November, so school will be closed to pupils. Let us know if you’d like to reschedule that week’s lessons.
Sorry — one more thing about Max (1 of 8). Quick question about Thursdays (2 of 8)
How it works
Three steps, then it’s done
- 1
Set up your school day
School hours, breaks, and the times you can’t teach. A few minutes, once.
- 2
Add your students
One at a time, or bring the list you already have — drop in a spreadsheet or paste straight from Excel, and it works out the columns.
- 3
Generate and share
A whole term of rotating lesson times, fair on breaks, as a PDF and a link parents can open on their phone.
A real school day
One school day, with everything people asked for
This is one of my seven. Building all of them by hand is where the evening goes — and where the mistakes come from.
It is a deliberately awkward day, and not an unusual one. Five hard rules, two pupils pinned to fixed slots, a pair sharing a lesson, and my own break to place — in a single school day.
Everything else rotates around those fixed points.
- Keith and Louise both have PE first thing — nothing before 09:30
- Louise also has cooking club, so nothing after 12:40 for the first six weeks
- Steve can’t be pulled out of maths, so 11:15 to 12:05 is out
- Max can only be taught between 10:50 and 12:05, at the SEN team’s request
- Caroline and Kendrick share a lesson, so their times have to match exactly, every week
- Daisy and Ben are pinned to the end of the day
- My own break is a soft rule — fifteen minutes, aiming for 11:00 — so it lands as close to that as it can without opening a gap in the day
- And the lessons themselves run fifteen, twenty and thirty minutes, side by side
What it handles
Built for the awkward bits
Mixed lesson durations
anything from 5 minutes to 2 hours, in five-minute steps, side by side in one day
Several schools
each with its own day, hours and breaks
Fixed lessons
pin a pupil to the first or last slot and rotate the others around them
Unavailable times
the pupil who cannot come out of Tuesday PE
Shared lessons
two pupils, same duration, same slot
Break fairness
tracked across the whole term, not avoided ad hoc
Versioned PDFs
when a parent asks for a change, the office knows which sheet is current
And then the rest of the term gets easier
Your week at a glance
day, week, month and whole-term views, colour-coded by school, with the holidays already in
Something to check between schools
tap into a day on your phone to see who you have and when, and swipe to the next one
Find anyone without the spreadsheet
search by name, or filter by school, day, or who is still on the waiting list
Email the right parents
filter to a school or pick a few pupils and it builds the BCC list for you — nobody sees anyone else’s address
Private pupils too
they sit in the same calendar as your school ones
And what it doesn’t do
Lesson Rotate builds timetables. It doesn’t keep registers or raise invoices, there’s no parent login, and there’s no app to download — parents get a link.
Registers and invoicing are next on my list. I’d rather do timetabling properly first than three things adequately.
Pricing
One plan. £5.99 a month.
£5.99/month or £59/year (saves about 18%)
Everything above, all your schools, as many pupils as you teach. No tiers, no per-pupil pricing, no setup fee.
14 days free, no card needed. The trial starts as soon as your account is set up. If you do nothing it simply stops — there’s no automatic charge and nothing to cancel.
During the trial you can build one school day. That’s enough to set up a real school, add your actual pupils, generate a term, publish it and send the PDF — the whole product, on your own students, not a demo. The rest of your week unlocks when you subscribe.
Who built this
Made by a peripatetic teacher, not a software company
I teach drums in seven schools — about ninety pupils, in lessons of fifteen, twenty and thirty minutes.
Every term, building those timetables was a long evening’s work. Rotate everyone by an hour. Work around who can’t do what. Make sure the breaks are fair. Keep the fixed pupils in place. Check the whole thing. Then triple-check it before it goes out to ninety families.
And then, inevitably, something changed — and it cost me another evening. Often one more.
I built Lesson Rotate because I wanted those evenings back. Change one pupil’s availability and it works through the knock-on effects for you. No accidentally turning a twenty-minute lesson into thirty. No staring at a spreadsheet wondering why the day is suddenly ten minutes longer than it should be.
It runs my own timetables now. But every teacher’s schools are different, and mine are only seven.
If any of that sounds familiar, give it a try. And if something doesn’t work the way you’d expect, or you’ve got a particularly awkward timetable, or there’s something you wish it could do — tell me. I’d much rather hear from you than guess what peripatetic teachers need.
— James, peripatetic drum teacher
hello@lessonrotate.com
Questions
Questions teachers ask
- Does it handle more than one school?
- Yes, as many as you teach — each with its own day, hours and break times. A school you visit twice a week is set up as two, one for each day.
- Can it do a fixed timetable — the same times every week?
- Yes. Set a school to fixed rather than rotating and it lays the day out around the same constraints, then you can drag lessons into a different order if you would rather.
- What if a parent asks to move a lesson mid-term?
- Swap the two lessons and republish. The PDF gets a new version number so the school office knows which sheet is current. You do not regenerate the term.
- Do I have to send parents a new link every time I change something?
- No. Each timetable has one link, for good. Make your change, press Publish, and the link parents already have shows the new version.
- Can I import my existing student list?
- Yes. Drop in a CSV or Excel file, or copy the cells straight out of Google Sheets and paste them. It works out whether you have given it names, names and durations, or full names in one column, and shows you a preview to correct before anything is saved. There is a template to download if you would rather start from one.
- Do parents need an account?
- No. Publishing gives you a link that opens in any browser, on a phone, with no login.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes — the whole app, not a cut-down version. Checking next week’s times between schools is what a phone is for; building a whole term is easier on a laptop, but it works on a phone or tablet if that is what you have.
- What happens to my timetables if I cancel?
- You keep access until the end of the period you have paid for, and you can export your PDFs at any point before then.
- Where is my pupils’ data stored?
- On servers in the UK — London — encrypted, and never sold or shared. You can delete a pupil or your whole account at any time and the data goes with it.
- Does it do registers or invoices?
- Not yet. Registers and invoicing are next on my list — I would rather do timetabling properly first than three things adequately.
- I teach privately as well as in schools. Does that work?
- Yes — private pupils sit alongside school ones in the calendar.
Get your evenings back
Fourteen days free, one school day, no charge until day 14.
Or sign in if you already have an account.