How to build a weekly timetable for your tuition batches
Most timetables are built the wrong way round. A tutor starts with the clock — 4pm, 5pm, 6pm — and squeezes batches into whatever is left. The batches that need the most time end up with the least convenient slots.
Build it the other way: work out how much teaching each batch actually needs this week, block the time you cannot teach at all, and only then fill the space in between.
Start from the classes each batch needs, not from the clock
For each batch, decide two numbers: how many classes a week it needs, and how long one class runs. A Class 10 maths batch may need three 90-minute classes; a spoken-English group may need two 60-minute ones.
Multiply them and you have the weekly load per batch. Add the batches up and you know whether the week you are planning is physically possible before you start placing anything.
- Classes per week × minutes per class = the real size of that batch
- Add every batch before you look at the calendar
- If the total does not fit, cut a class or drop a batch — do not shorten every class
Block the time you cannot teach first
School pickups, your own classes, meals, family duties, and travel between two localities — all of that goes in first, as permanent blocks. A timetable that ignores them is the reason tutors end up teaching at 9:30pm.
Once the blocks are in, the slots that remain are the only ones you should be filling. It is a small change of order that makes the whole week feel calmer.
Group home visits by locality, not by convenience
If you teach at students' homes, travel is part of your working day. Two visits in the same neighbourhood an hour apart cost you a trip you did not need to make.
Put all home visits in one locality back to back, and keep a buffer between two different localities — twenty or thirty minutes in a city, more if you are crossing a river or a highway at peak hour. This single habit can free up an evening a week.
Put a hard cap on the day
Decide the maximum number of classes you will teach on any day — five is a common honest answer — and treat it as a rule rather than a target. The sixth class is rarely the problem; it is the first three the next morning that suffer.
Leave one evening a week genuinely empty. Not empty-until-someone-asks. Empty on the timetable, so that a make-up class or a parent meeting has somewhere to go.
Plan once per term and adjust weekly
The mistake is rebuilding the entire timetable every Sunday. Do the big planning once at the start of a term — the batches, the days, the fixed slots — and then only adjust the exceptions each week: a cancelled class, a test, a festival.
Keep the term plan visible somewhere you and the parents can both see it. When a class changes, change the exception, not the whole week.
Publish the timetable where parents can find it
A timetable that only exists in your head generates the same question from five parents. Put it on the batch page, on a notice board, or send it once as a photo at the start of the term.
Parents rearrange their evenings around your schedule. The least you can do is make the schedule readable at a glance.
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