How the planner works

Setting up the term

First teaching date is the date of the first lesson; the plan walks forward from it through the teaching days you tick, one session per teaching day, until it has as many sessions as you asked for.

Teaching days are the days of the week you teach — tick several if a class meets twice a week. Sessions land on those days only.

Number of sessions is how many lessons the term holds. Build up to 60. The quick term-length buttons (6, 10, 12, 24) just set this count and rebuild.

Minutes per session: set it to the length of one session (say 45 or 60) and the plan gains a minutes column plus the total contact time for the term; leave it blank and the table stays three columns wide.

Date wording switches every date between “Wed 3 Apr 2026”, “Wednesday 3 April 2026” and “Wed, April 3, 2026” — in the table, the summary and the copied text.

Start numbering at renumbers the plan: set it to 5 and the rows are numbered 5, 6, 7 … instead of 1, 2, 3 …, which is handy when a term continues an earlier one and you want the session numbers to keep counting. It changes the # column, the summary and both copied formats, and nothing else; leave it at 1 for a normal term.

Last teaching date is for when you know the date of the final lesson but not how many lessons that makes. Type it in and press “Work out sessions”: the planner counts the teaching days from the first teaching date to that date, minus skip dates — the same rules the plan uses — writes the answer into “Number of sessions” and rebuilds the plan to end on that last teaching day. A stretch longer than the 60 sessions the planner builds sets the count to 60 and says which date the plan then ends on; dates or teaching days that make no sense get a message instead of a guess. Blank changes nothing: the count you typed is used.

End with a revision week reserves the final session for “Revision and review of the whole term”; the topics you typed then fill the sessions before it, and any topics left over are listed under the table.

Spread catch-up sessions evenly deals the spare sessions out between your topics instead of leaving them all at the end: with 8 topics in 12 sessions each gap of “Review and catch-up” lands after a few topics, so the term has a breather built in. It does nothing when your topics already fill every session, and it is off unless you tick it.

Show a week number column, off by default, adds a “Week” column between the date and the topic. Week 1 is the week of the first session, and each later week that holds a session takes the next number, so the column counts the teaching weeks of the term rather than plain calendar weeks — a half-term week with no session is simply skipped and does not push the numbering out. The summary counts the weeks, the status line repeats it, and both copied formats gain a matching “Week” column when it is on.

What the plan covers is a short label for the term in your own words — “Chapters 1-4”, “Units 1-3 and exam technique”. When it is filled in, the summary gains a “Covers …” line, the status line repeats it, “Copy as text” puts it on the first line as “Covers: …” above the dated rows, the printed sheet carries it in its heading line, and the saved CSV file is named after it. Long text is squeezed onto one line and cut off at 120 characters; the CSV is left alone so its header row still starts the columns.

Writing the topics

Topic line cheat sheet

Three marks do all the work on a topic line, and one line can carry all of them.

• One line, one session — Fractions review. Add nothing and the topic takes the next session.
• Several sessions for one topic — Mock exam (2). A number in brackets at the end gives that topic that many sessions, labelled “(1 of 2)”, “(2 of 2)” in the table and the copied text.
• Two topics in one session — Grammar drill / Reading check. A slash with a space on each side gives the session a main topic and a second one, the second shown on its own line under the first.
• A note for that session — Writing task 1 — bring your draft. A dash with a space on each side turns the rest of the line into the note for that session: an em dash, or two hyphens (Mock exam (2) -- no calculators).

Written together, one line can be Mock exam (2) — no calculators — two sessions, with the note on the first row only — or Grammar drill / Reading check -- bring the handout. A line that only looks like one is left as it was typed: “Chapter 3-4” keeps its hyphen, “and/or” keeps its slash, and a dash with nothing on one side of it changes nothing.

Topics are one per line and become sessions in the order you typed them. A session's second topic is joined back with “ / ” in the copied text and the CSV, and the summary and the status line count how many sessions carry one. If fewer sessions are left than a topic asks for, it takes what is left and the plan says so above the table. The notes a topic line can carry are described under Notes.

Extra sessions are filled with review and catch-up — turn on “Spread catch-up sessions evenly” to place them between topics instead.

Fields rebuild the plan when you leave them: type a topic line and then click or tab away, and the plan is built again with the new line in it. The same happens for a date, the session count, the skip dates, the notes box and any of the ticks and drop-downs. The Copy, Save and Print buttons leave the box first, so they work from what you just typed. “Build schedule” is still there for a deliberate rebuild.

When a field cannot be read at all — the first teaching date cleared, no teaching day ticked, the session count empty or out of range, a skip date that makes no sense, a number mistyped — the planner builds nothing, says what is wrong under the buttons, and keeps the last plan it built on screen instead of clearing it. A short line at the top of the plan panel then says what you are looking at: “The plan below is the last one built, so it does not match the fields above”, with the reason and the fix after it; with nothing built yet it reads “No plan yet” and the reason, so the plan panel is never blank. Put the field right, build again, and the line clears itself. It is for the screen only — it never appears on the printed sheet — and it changes nothing else: the table, summary, copied text, CSV and estimate stay what the planner would have made.

Notes, two ways

A topic line can carry a note of its own: a dash with a space on each side turns the rest of the line into that session's note, which then appears in the Notes column of the table, in “Copy as text” and in the CSV, exactly like a note typed in the notes box. The mark itself — an em dash or two hyphens, and the rule that only a dash with a space on each side counts — is set out in Writing the topics. What is worth knowing here is where the note lands: it sits after the topic's own parts, so a bracket number for a multi-session topic still works and the “ / ” second topic is untouched; a topic that takes several sessions keeps its note on the first row only, so the note is not repeated down the table; and a topic-line note is squeezed onto one line and cut off at 120 characters.

The note goes with its topic, so a topic that did not fit in the plan takes its note with it rather than dropping it in silence. When that happens the box under the table lists the leftover lines as you typed them — “Writing task 1 — bring your draft” — and says the notes are left out of the copied text as well; the summary, the status line and the warning box under the table all count them, so a note is never quietly missing from the plan you hand out.

Notes in the box under “Notes, one line per session” work by position: line 1 belongs to session 1 — “bring the workbook” on the first line lands on the first session, whatever topic ends up there. A blank line means “no note for that session”. The notes column, and the notes column in both copied formats, only appears once you write at least one note, so an empty box leaves the table exactly as it was. A note written past the last session has no session to land on, so it is left out of the table and of the copied text, and the plan says how many notes were stranded and which line of the notes box is the first of them.

The two ways can land on the same session. Both are kept: the topic-line note comes first, then the box note, joined with “ · ” in the Notes column and in both copied formats. The summary and the status line say how many sessions carry a note and how many of those notes came from a topic line. The example topics include one with a note, so you can see it in the table straight away.

Dates, skip dates and half terms

Skip dates takes single days and whole stretches. Write single days as YYYY-MM-DD, separated by commas, spaces or semicolons; write a closed stretch with two dots between the first and last date — “2026-02-16..2026-02-20” skips a half term week, counting both ends. Stretches can be mixed with single days in the same list, and a stretch longer than 120 days or written back to front is refused with a message instead of quietly changing the term. Skipped days do not take a session, so the term simply carries on past them.

The half-term buttons beside the skip dates box add a whole week to it for you. Each one works out the Monday-to-Friday week a half term usually falls in — the week of the third Monday of February, the last Monday of May, or the last Monday of October — taking the first year on or after your first teaching date, so a term starting in September 2026 gets the February week of 2027. The dates are written into the box as a range (“2027-02-15..2027-02-19”), added to whatever is already there, and the plan rebuilds straight away; a week that is already in the box is left alone and the line under the buttons says so, and a missing or invalid first teaching date gets its own message instead of a guess. School holidays differ from school to school and council to council, so treat the dates as a starting point to check against your own calendar: the box stays editable and you can delete or change what was added.

Getting the plan out

“Copy as text” puts the dated plan on the clipboard with tab-separated columns, ready for a document or an email. “Copy as CSV” copies the same rows comma-separated, with a header row, so a spreadsheet splits it into #, Date, Week (if you turned the week column on), Mins (if you set minutes), Topic and Notes (if you wrote any) columns; a value containing a comma or a quote is quoted properly. Both fill the box under the table, so if the clipboard is blocked you can select the box and copy it by hand.

“Save CSV file” asks the browser to save those same comma-separated rows as a file. It does not write a second CSV of its own: it presses the planner's own “Copy as CSV” to fill the box under the table with the rows exactly as the planner makes them, reads that box, and hands the text to the browser as a download. The file is called term-plan.csv, or term-plan-chapters-1-4.csv when “What the plan covers” is filled in — the label shortened to letters, numbers and single dashes. The file starts with a byte-order mark so a spreadsheet opens it in one click without asking about the text encoding. A page cannot tell whether a download was actually allowed, so the line under the buttons says only that the browser was asked, and it always names the box under the table as the fallback: that box holds the same CSV whether or not the file was saved. With no plan built yet the button says so rather than saving an empty file.

“Print plan” opens your browser's print dialog with the setup form and the copy box hidden, so you get a clean sheet or PDF of the dated table. The sheet carries a heading of its own: the planner's name, a second line with what the plan covers when you filled that in, and the stretch the term runs over — “Covers: Chapters 1-4 · 12 sessions, Wed 3 Apr 2026 to Wed 24 Jun 2026” — read off the plan as it stands and printed in your chosen date wording. That line is written into the table's own header, so a plan that runs onto a second page or a third carries the same line at the top of each page instead of losing it after the first. With no plan built yet there is no table to hold it, so the heading is just the planner's name. The line above the plan that warns of an out-of-date plan is kept off the printed sheet, so a warning about the screen never lands on a sheet you hand out.

Under the buttons a line estimates how many printed sheets the plan takes — “Rough estimate: one printed sheet for 12 sessions on A4”, or “Heads-up: this plan needs about 2 printed sheets for 34 sessions on A4”, which adds that the heading repeats at the top of each sheet and that a shorter session count or fewer long notes brings the plan back to one. It counts the rows and how far each wraps, plus the summary above the table and the warning box under it, since both of those print. A multi-sheet line also takes the amber tint and border of the warning box, so the estimate worth noticing does not sit in quiet grey; the tint is an extra sign rather than the only one, because the sentence still begins “Heads-up”. The line is for the screen only, and it is a rule of thumb for A4 with ordinary margins and 12pt text — browsers differ, so the print preview is the true count. It updates as you change the plan and reads “build a plan” while there is nothing to print.

Known limits

• Dates use the plain calendar you type in. The planner does not know your school's term dates or public holidays unless you list them under skip dates, and the half-term buttons only follow the usual pattern.
• The print layout, the repeating heading row and the sheet estimate have been checked in a browser's print preview only, not on a real printer, so check one sheet before you run off a class set; the estimate is a rule of thumb, measured from the summary, the rows and the warning box, and can still be out by a sheet on a plan with long topics or notes.
• “Save CSV file” has been checked in a browser only, and a page cannot tell whether a download was allowed: some embedded viewers block downloads, so the box under the table stays as the fallback.
• When both the clipboard and the download are blocked, that box under the table is the way to get the rows out.
• Nothing is saved between visits: reloading the page resets the form, so copy your plan before you leave.