Cover planning – a look inside a development

On everyday school life, the workload of teachers and the many considerations that go into developing school software.

Since May we at Prilog have been working on cover management. What started as a manageable project has since produced an extensive study, several revised concepts and a whole series of fundamental questions.

At its heart is an everyday task: a teacher is absent, the affected lessons have to be organised, and someone decides who can take the cover.

As a teacher, I know these situations from everyday school life. As a developer, I now deal with the considerations that are needed for software to support such decisions in a sensible way.

You learn a surprising amount about how a school is organised. And occasionally also about your own ideas of how a school works.

The time between lessons

The timetable contains lessons, breaks and free periods. For cover planning, this information is the starting point.

What a teacher does during their non-teaching time is usually not recorded there.

Tests are marked, lessons prepared, conversations with parents held or things discussed with colleagues. Occasionally there is also time for a coffee and a chat in the staff room.

How this time is used differs from person to person and changes considerably over the course of a week.

So during development the question arises which of these circumstances software can sensibly take into account.

Some of it can be derived from existing data. This includes the teaching load, covers already taken, known additional duties and how lessons are spread over the week.

Other circumstances remain part of personal work organisation.

We are therefore working on a workload model that looks at known school commitments over a longer period. Past covers are taken into account, with their weight decreasing over time. The different teaching loads also go into the calculation.

The weighting is also meant to change as the workload increases. A teacher who has already stepped in several times will be considered more cautiously for further cover suggestions.

Working out such rules raises countless detailed questions. How long should a cover that has been taken count? Which additional commitments are relevant? How can differences between full-time and part-time be represented sensibly?

And which information do we actually need for this?

With personal data in particular, restraint is important. The software should work with the information required for organising the school. Personal circumstances remain, as a matter of principle, the responsibility of the people concerned and of those responsible for them.

Established arrangements and new transparency

When introducing school software, I have seen several times how much attention a school’s existing habits deserve.

Over the years, every staff develops its own ways of working together. Certain tasks are taken on by certain people. There are arrangements, personal agreements and well-practised responsibilities.

Some of them are written down. Others have developed in daily dealings with one another.

That plays a role in cover planning too.

Some teachers regularly take on extra lessons. Others have particular time constraints or special duties that have been taken into account in planning for years.

When a single, shared piece of software is introduced, such differences become more clearly visible.

The covers taken so far can be compared. Teaching loads can be factored in. Workloads over time appear in a shared overview.

Questions sometimes come up that were hardly asked before.

Why does one teacher regularly take more covers than another? What special arrangements exist? Are they still current? And which duties are actually taken into account in the distribution so far?

Such questions can touch sensitive areas.

A teacher may have relied on a particular arrangement for years. Their free time has long been filled with family or school commitments. Other colleagues may not know these backgrounds at all.

When a new system makes workloads more comparable, there needs to be room for explanations and adjustments.

The background to an existing arrangement is part of understanding it.

I consider this an essential part of introducing software successfully.

The people involved need the opportunity to contribute their experience. Existing agreements must be looked at together and, where it makes sense, carried over into the new processes.

Some changes can be implemented quickly. Others need a longer transition.

For the programming, this means schools must be able to represent their own rules and adjust them when needed. Just as important are traceable decisions and the possibility to step in with good reason in individual cases.

A good introduction requires patience from everyone involved. Previous experience is valuable precisely because it brings to light circumstances that are easily overlooked in a technical design.

A school year has its own rhythm

When looking at workload, the course of the year also plays an important role.

In September, everyday work often looks different from November or just before school reports.

Exams, class tests, parents’ evenings, staff meetings and special school events lead to phases of increased strain. Some tasks are concentrated in a few weeks, others are spread more evenly across the school year.

Marking an exam can take several hours. With several classes, that adds up accordingly.

An extra cover lesson weighs more heavily in such weeks.

We want to take these seasonal fluctuations into account during development.

The exam calendar, for example, offers a helpful basis for this. Upcoming peaks in workload can be derived from known exam dates and taken into account in cover suggestions.

Of course, the actual effort remains individual. The type of exam, the number of students and the demands of a subject all play a role.

So we have to decide carefully which information provides a sufficiently reliable basis for the calculation.

Another aspect is how workload develops over time. A work-intensive phase is often followed by a quieter one. Some tasks, however, stretch over weeks.

The planned workload model is meant to take such developments into account and so allow a longer-term view of how additional work is distributed.

The situation of the classes

While looking at the teachers, we have increasingly included the perspective of the classes in our planning as well.

Cancelled lessons are distributed unevenly across the school year. In some classes, cancellations in a particular subject pile up for a while. Others are less affected.

This history can matter for the decision about a cover.

If a class has already lost several maths lessons and an exam is coming up, this should be known during planning.

For this we have planned a cancellation account that is to be based on the entries in the class register. It makes it possible to look at lessons held and lessons cancelled over longer periods.

This broadens the basis for cover planning.

We can take into account the previous workload of the teachers in question, the situation of the affected classes and the importance of the lesson concerned.

From this information, suggestions are to be generated whose reasons remain understandable.

One difficult task lies in weighting the individual criteria.

How is an increased workload taken into account? What influence do repeated cancellations in a subject have? Which time constraints are binding? And how can a school bring in its own educational priorities?

Some of these decisions we will have to fix technically in the software. Others are the responsibility of the school and its relevant bodies.

That is why the rules should remain traceable and, within the necessary legal and organisational limits, adjustable.

The question of an alternative is part of this too.

If the program suggests a particular teacher, those responsible should later be able to see which criteria were decisive and why other options seemed less suitable.

Confidential personal information remains protected throughout.

Looking at the whole school day

Another consideration concerns planning several covers together.

On a day with six open lessons, there may be a whole range of suitable assignments.

If each lesson is filled individually, an early decision can limit the options for later lessons.

A teacher might, for example, first take a supervision and then no longer be available for a later subject lesson for which they would have been particularly suitable.

That is why our concept includes the whole school day in the calculation.

The program is meant to compare different assignments and take into account their effects on teaching, workload and further planning.

Absences already known for the coming days can also help here.

This approach increases the technical effort considerably. On top of that come the different timetable models, block teaching (Epochenunterricht), team teaching, sub-groups and special rules at individual schools.

Since development began in May 2026, we have therefore revised several concepts and adapted them to Prilog’s technical foundations, which have developed further in the meantime.

In October this led to an extensive study on the planned cover engine.

The first development stage is now fully specified. It covers recording absences, identifying the affected lessons and organising covers manually.

Automatic suggestions, the workload calculation and the joint optimisation of a school day are planned for later development stages.

Before automating further, we want to simulate various school situations. These include ordinary teaching days as well as flu waves, exam periods and days with severe staff shortages.

We are particularly interested in how decisions affect teachers’ workload and the classes’ teaching situation in the long term.

How software finds a home in the staff

Because of my experience with introducing school software, another task is particularly on my mind.

How to use a new program can usually be explained fairly quickly. A sick note is entered, a cover plan opened, a change confirmed.

Understanding the processes behind it develops over a longer period.

Teachers should know, for example, which information goes into cover planning, how workload is taken into account and why certain suggestions come about.

This knowledge helps them to put decisions into context, ask questions and suggest corrections when needed.

In practice, this takes time and repetition.

That is actually a familiar educational experience.

We know from teaching that new connections gradually become second nature through repeated encounters, application and one’s own experience.

When introducing new school software, we should make use of this knowledge too.

A one-off training session gives a first overview. In everyday school life afterwards, the questions often only arise when a particular feature is actually needed.

That is why at Prilog we want to make sure the software makes its way of working understandable in daily use.

When a cover is suggested, the decisive criteria can be visible. When a weighting changes, the cause can be explained. When a special situation arises, hints can help to put the possible decisions into context.

In this way, understanding grows as the software is used.

For teachers, this is a pleasant way of learning. They know the principle from their own teaching, but here they meet it from the other side.

And they will probably progress at just as different speeds as their students.

That is part of a realistic introduction as well.

The people behind the cover plan

For all the work on algorithms, workload models and planning rules, the cover plan remains a human matter.

A school thrives on the cooperation of its teachers and on their willingness to take on extra responsibility in special situations.

Sometimes there is a straightforward solution for a cancelled lesson. On other days the options are already largely exhausted.

Then someone is asked whether they can take one more lesson.

And often someone can.

In everyday school life this happens as a matter of course. A teacher changes their preparation, takes over someone else’s class or moves a task to the afternoon.

This willingness deserves attention, not least because it is hardly visible in the finished cover plan.

After all, all it says there is who takes which lesson.

For the development of Prilog, handling this willingness with care is an important yardstick.

We want to make additional workloads visible over longer periods, make their distribution traceable and give schools a better basis for their decisions.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are situations in which the available staff is simply not enough.

Software should be able to show that clearly too.

Our work currently consists of many individual considerations, calculations, decisions and tests. Some questions can already be answered well. Others we will only understand sufficiently with experience from practical use.

Meanwhile, the teachers whose working day we are developing this software for do their work every day.

They teach, prepare, support their classes and help one another when it becomes necessary.

In doing so, they carry a large part of what holds a school together day to day.

I hope that our cover management makes this work a little easier for them and helps to treat their time and their commitment responsibly.

That is worth a longer development process.

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From the development of Prilog – cover readiness. A look at our thinking on school organisation, workload distribution and designing traceable decisions. As of October 2026.