Lessons are still on a non-teaching day

An INSET day, a closure or a bank holiday went in after the year had been diarised, and the lessons sitting on those days have not moved. Saving a date does not shift anything by itself - this is how to get every date in, at the right level, and lay the year once.

Step 1 of 8

Every date in first, starting with the whole service

Open the academic year - Settings, then Calendar - and the non-working dates sit under the terms, with Add non-working dates beneath them. Each entry is a stretch of time rather than a single day: From takes a date and either Morning or Afternoon, To takes a date and either Mid Day or End Of Day. A single afternoon and a fortnight's closure are both one row. Type a description you will recognise later, because that is what shows in the list afterwards.

This list is the whole service's non-working time. A day that only closes one school, or only takes one teacher out, does not belong here - putting it here stops everybody teaching.

Use the arrow keys to move between steps.

Every date in first, starting with the whole service — press Escape or click to close

1. Every date in first, starting with the whole service

   Open the academic year - Settings, then Calendar - and the non-working dates sit under the terms, with Add non-working dates beneath them. Each entry is a stretch of time rather than a single day: From takes a date and either Morning or Afternoon, To takes a date and either Mid Day or End Of Day. A single afternoon and a fortnight's closure are both one row. Type a description you will recognise later, because that is what shows in the list afterwards.

   This list is the whole service's non-working time. A day that only closes one school, or only takes one teacher out, does not belong here - putting it here stops everybody teaching.

2. A school, a teacher or a service type keeps its own

   Three other levels exist, and the plan engine reads all four. A school's or a centre's closure days live on that contact's own Dates tab, under its School or Centre tab. A teacher's live the same way, on their Teacher tab. A service type has non-working time of its own. Put each date at the level it actually applies to - that is what decides who stops teaching, and it is the part people most often get wrong.

   A teacher's date only counts once it has been approved. Entered but still waiting, the engine ignores it and the lesson stays where it is. And a school's closure days are deliberately not shown in a teacher's diary - a teacher looks at their own diary, which would otherwise carry every school's dates.

3. Saving the date moves nothing, and that is the whole problem

   The plan engine reads non-working dates as it lays sessions. It does not go back over sessions already sitting in the schedules. Add a date after the year has been diarised and every lesson already on that day stays exactly where it is. Nothing has gone wrong and nothing is going to happen on its own - the dates are an input to the next run, not a rule applied to what is already there.

   The same is true of bank holidays and of a school's or teacher's own time. So put every date in before you press anything - there is nothing to gain from diarising after each one, and a whole-year run is the same amount of work either way.

4. Then Diarise the year, once

   What Diarise does depends on whether the year is open for scheduling. With Open Schedule not ticked it lays the schedules that already exist, keeping sessions off term breaks, bank holidays and non-working dates, and creates nothing. With it ticked it first creates this year's schedules from last year's - for the service types that progress schedules, along with the year's charges and the schools' SLAs - and then lays every plan's sessions.

   Ticking Open Schedule does nothing by itself; pressing Diarise is what lays. On a year with it ticked the button sits beside the tick box, and from the next Fusion release it also appears under the Non Working Dates list as soon as you add, change or remove a date. Until that reaches you, a year that is not open for scheduling has no Diarise button of its own - tick Open Schedule and save first, knowing that run will also create schedules from last year for any plan still without one.

5. Read the numbers it reports, especially removed

   When it finishes it says what it did - schedules created, schedules laid, sessions added, moved and removed, and how many were already as they should be. Sessions being removed is not a fault: a term that no longer has room for its full count loses the ones that no longer fit. That figure is the early warning for the short term at the end of this walkthrough, so it is worth reading rather than closing.

   If a diary still shows the old lesson after a run that reported the change, close the view and open it again. You are looking at something that was loaded before the run.

6. Deal with anything it could not lay

   It then lists what it could not lay, with a reason for each. Usually that is a schedule where the change would touch lessons already marked, confirmed or credited - the batch leaves those alone rather than overwriting somebody's register. These are not failures to retry; they need a person. Open each one it names and make the change from its Schedule tab, where it is previewed and you agree to it before anything moves.

   A lesson already paid to a teacher is never moved at all, by the batch or by hand. Where that is what is in the way, a make-up is the route rather than a re-lay.

7. One schedule still wrong? Look for an End Date

   If a single schedule will not re-lay however often you try, open its plan and look at End Date. The engine cannot schedule work beyond it, so the sessions that should have spread across the rest of the term either bunch up at that date or never appear. It is nearly always a leftover from something earlier in the year. Clear it and lay that schedule again from its Schedule tab.

   The symptom is distinctive: most of a term's sessions stacked on one day rather than spread a week apart.

8. Expect a term to come out one session short

   Each term lays its Term sessions and no more than will fit between the term's dates. A non-teaching day does not simply vanish from the run - the lessons after it each move on a week, and if the term has no spare week on that weekday the last one falls past the end of term and is dropped. A term with exactly eleven Mondays, one of them an INSET day, leaves every Monday schedule with ten sessions. Nothing carries it into the next term by itself.

   To make that session up later, raise the next term's Term sessions by one on the schedule. That charges for it as well, which is normally right - the pupil is having the lesson. Asking for more than a term can hold behaves the same way: enter twenty-four against the autumn term alone and you get however many autumn has room for, so split them across terms instead.

Why this one is worth knowing

This is the most reported thing in this part of Xperios, and almost every report is the same shape: the dates went in after the year was diarised. The lessons never moved because nothing asked them to.

It helps to know why it works that way. Non-working dates are read as sessions are laid — they are an input to the run, not a standing rule that keeps being re-applied. That is why saving a date is silent, and why the answer is never to keep editing dates and waiting. Get every date in, at the level it belongs to, then lay the year once and read what the run tells you.

The level matters as much as the date. A school's closure put on the academic year stops the whole service teaching; a teacher's date left unapproved does nothing at all. From a diary, both look like the same fault.

The same ground, as reference

• Non Working Dates — the four levels, and how a date is entered
• Diarise — what a run does with Open Schedule on and off, and what it reports
• Why a term can end up one session short — the rule in full
• Academic Year — every field on the screen
• Make-ups — where a lost lesson goes when the schedule cannot take it back