A teacher calls in sick at 07:40

The phone goes at twenty to eight. Clara has flu and will not be in.

You have about forty minutes. In that time you need to know which lessons are affected, who is genuinely free to take them, what to do about the ones nobody can, and — the part everyone forgets until it goes wrong — how to tell four hundred people before period one.

This happens every week in every school. It is not an edge case. It is the job.

The first ten minutes are pure lookup

Clara teaches four lessons on a Wednesday. Which four? That is in the timetable, filed under her name if you are lucky and under four different classes if you are not.

Then the harder question: who can take them? "Free" is not the same as "not teaching". A teacher already covering elsewhere is not free. Someone with their only non-contact of the day is technically free and practically a bad idea.

So it becomes a scan across a printout, holding four time slots in your head, crossing out names. Ten minutes if you know the timetable well. Longer if you are covering for the person who does.

Start from the absence, not the timetable

Mark Clara absent for the day and the four affected lessons appear at once — because the system already knows what she teaches. No scan, no crossing out.

For each one you can see who is actually free at that hour: not "has a gap somewhere today", but free then, checked against the same timetable everything else reads. The lookup that took ten minutes is the screen you are already looking at.

Not every lesson gets covered, and pretending otherwise helps nobody

This is where most substitution tools quietly lie. They assume every absence resolves into an assignment, because that is the tidy case.

Real mornings are not tidy. Some lessons get a substitute. Some get cancelled — the class is told, the room is freed. And some are simply uncovered: nobody is available, the lesson stands in the timetable, and everyone needs to know it has no teacher.

All three are outcomes you can record. Uncovered is not an error state or an unfinished task nagging at you from a list; it is a decision you made at 07:52 because there was genuinely nobody, and the honest thing is to publish it rather than leave a lesson looking normal.

A morning might end up: two lessons reassigned, one cancelled, one uncovered. That is a good outcome, and every one of those four is now a fact the school can act on.

Arranging cover is half the job

Here is the part the other tools leave to you.

You have made four decisions. Now: the corridor screen still shows Clara. The teachers who checked their link at breakfast have yesterday's answer. The class whose lesson you cancelled is walking to a room that will be empty. Reception has no idea.

Traditionally this is a second, worse job — a group email, a note on the staffroom door, someone standing in a corridor redirecting a class.

Because the substitutions live on the same timetable everything else reads, there is no second job. The screen by the staffroom door already shows the substitute. The shared links already show it. The embed on the school website already shows it. You did not publish anything; there was never a separate copy to update.

That is the whole argument for doing cover here rather than in a tool that only does cover.

What people see

Not everyone should see everything. "Clara is off sick" is not the corridor's business; "Spanish is with Anna Novak in Room 103" is.

So what a public view shows can be controlled. The substitution is visible because people need it; the absence behind it does not have to be.

Forty minutes, mostly spent deciding

The lookup was never the valuable part. Neither was the telling. The valuable part is the judgement in the middle — who can genuinely take this, what is worth cancelling, which class copes without a teacher for forty minutes.

That is the part that needs a person, and it is the part that gets squeezed when the other two eat the morning.

Clara is off. Four lessons. Two covered, one cancelled, one honestly marked uncovered — and the whole school knew before the first bell.

How the substitution list is built →