What to put in a teacher planner that you will still use in March

A teacher planner fails for one of two reasons: it asks for more than there is time to write between lessons, or it has no page for the thing you actually need at 8:40 in the morning. Both are set-up problems, and both are fixed before term starts rather than during it.

The pages that survive the year

1. 1A week on two pages, with the timetable already printed in. If you have to rewrite period four every Sunday, you will stop by October.
2. 2A class list per group, with the columns you actually chase: permissions, equipment, reading level, whatever your school asks for twice a term.
3. 3A page per class for seating, redrawn in pencil. It is the single most-consulted page for a cover teacher and for you in week one.
4. 4Assessment: one row per pupil, one column per piece. Marks live in the school system; this is the page that tells you who has not handed anything in.
5. 5Contact log: date, who, why, what was agreed. Three lines each. This is the page that protects you, and it is the one most planners leave out.

What to leave out

• Daily reflection prompts. Lovely in August, blank by September.
• Anything duplicating the school's system: attendance, formal marks, behaviour points. Write it once, in the place it is checked.
• Habit and water trackers. This is a work planner, and the mixed ones get left in a bag.
• A yearly calendar you will not update. Keep the term dates and the deadlines; skip the rest.

The afternoon that sets it up

Print the timetable into every week before anything else. Then add the fixed points for the whole term at once: term dates, parents' evenings, report deadlines, trips, exam windows, the two INSET days. That is the part nobody does mid-term, and it is what makes the planner worth opening in March.

Then leave it. A planner set up for the whole year in one sitting takes about two hours and saves the twenty minutes a week that go into rewriting the same grid.

Paper, digital, or both

Paper wins for the pages you use standing up: seating, class lists, the register you carry to the fire drill. Digital wins for anything you search, sort, or share with a colleague — assessment and contact logs especially, because a spreadsheet answers "who has not handed in" in one click and a paper page does not.

Most teachers who keep a system all year end up with both, split along that line. The mistake is keeping the same information in both places: pick one home for each page and never write it twice.