As Zen masters and students on summer holidays have always known, time is an illusion. That is, until you are faced with taming the tangled web of school calendars. At that point, time becomes a real pain in the arse, and managing it feels like herding cats armed with Gantt charts.
Calendars are a notoriously difficult beast to tame, in this case I've had at least 3 significant attempts at taming Carey Baptist College, WA with each one getting closer.
Lets start with the students and the parents
Why: Avoiding the constant needless interuptions?
the "why spend the effort", comes down to communication and efficiency. If your parents do not know when something is happening because there is no easy way to access that information, they will call. They will ask your admin staff, year coordinators, teachers, coaches, tutors, and anyone else who might provide an answer. This creates a constant cycle of interruptions that wastes everyone’s time. Worse still, it trains parents to rely on help rather than checking your systems because they have learned from experience that the information is not readily available.
Taming the calendar means breaking this cycle. By streamlining your calendars, you will reduce unnecessary communication by up to fifty percent, while empowering your parents and students to independently find out what is happening and when.
Identifying the Calendar(s)
Calendars in independent schools are numerous and often scattered across different systems. Here are some examples you are likely to encounter:
Timetable
Daily organisation (daily timetable changes)
School Calendar (major events in the school, often split by year groups and campuses)
Assessment Calendar (typically divided by year groups and covering standardised testing)
Homework (also known as due work)
Events (including incursions and excursions)
Sports Calendar (covering coaching sessions and team practices)
Music Tutoring or Peripatetics
Parent Teacher Interviews
And more
The Systems
At Carey Baptist College, their system landscape includes the following:
1. TES Timetable (Formerly Edval)
Tes Timetable is used for timetables, daily organisation, and managing much of their co-curricular activities.
2. TES Timetable App
This parent-facing app enables scheduling and hosting of parent-teacher interviews. While it covers a small area of calendar functionality, it lacks integration with other systems, making it more challenging to manage. Even small gaps like this can become frustrating bottlenecks.
3. Veracross (New)
Veracross is Carey’s future Student Information System (SIS). While pulling data from Veracross is straightforward, its calendar lacks writeable APIs (shout out to Rob Sayad). This limitation means Veracross cannot be the aggregated source of truth for calendar data. However, Veracross will still require access to the timetable and daily organisational changes.
4. Schoolbox (New)
Schoolbox acts as a Swiss Army knife for calendar management, offering integration capabilities with various systems, including TES Timetable, Veracross, Consent2go, and Paperly.
At Carey, Schoolbox connects directly with TES Timetable rather than through Veracross. This decision is based on timing. TES Timetable pushes daily organisational updates immediately upon being saved. If daily organisational changes were pulled from the SIS (Veracross), updates would need to occur up to six times a day to remain current, which could still result in delays. Since academic staff and students—who are the primary users of daily organisational updates—are mostly within Schoolbox, it is crucial that this information remains up to date there.
Additionally, teachers using the LMS features of Schoolbox to post assessments, and homework will see these items automatically populate student calendars.
5. Consent2Go
Provides event management for the school. Consent2Go is actively developing calendar integration that will allow event attendee lists to be synced with Schoolbox calendars. Carey primarily uses Consent2go due to its focus on managing non-sporting events.
6. Google Calendar
Google Calendar is currently used for managing school-wide calendars. Unfortunately, it does not offer out-of-the-box integration with Schoolbox. However, an API is available, making integration possible with some custom development. Alternatively, the school could choose to move these calendars directly into Schoolbox for simplicity.
7. Clipboard (Not yet purchased)
Clipboard is known for being a good co-curricular package that integrates with Schoolbox.
Attempt #1
Revision (or failure) #1: Lessons learnt
Carey has a small sports program (which is where Clipboard excells). The school primarily manages co-curricular from Edval and Consent2go
Syncing times were might not be necessary as some programs are syncing on demand such as the daily org which will sync when it's being saved. Consent2go has
Connecting Edval Directly to Schoolbox might be a better solution (note that I reverted this later)
The school needs a solution to manage Music Tutors
Some of the logo's are old (note to self: make-look-pretty!)
Attempt #2
Changes for Revision #2:
Added Paperly (New?)
Under consideration as a music management solution along with simply managing this out of veracross.
Added Digistorm EduApp
This app will be the primary interface for parents to view the school calendar. Notably, Veracross owns Digistorm and plans significant development on its integration roadmap, with updates expected to conclude by the second quarter of 2025. These upcoming changes may influence Carey’s calendar strategy in the future. This was always in the picture, just needed to be added to the diagram.
Removed Clipboard
Removed Google Calendar
Having staff enter calendar information might be preferable to trying to connect Google to Schoolbox. (I will revert this decision later)
Changed the Integration between Veracross and Schoolbox to be Edval to Schoolbox (I will revert this change in Version 3)
Revision (or failure) #2: Lessons learnt
Paperly already integrates its excursion management features with Schoolbox calendars, but its music module does not yet offer this functionality. (Thanks to Daniel Dawson and Patrick Connolly for pointing this out)
The School is using Edval to conduct Parent/Teacher Interviews which doesn't integrate with anything (Shout out to Edval support)
Paperly has a Parent Teacher Interview module that integrates with Schoolbox! (Thanks to Daniel Dawson and Patrick Connolly for pointing this out)
A Google calendar can be synced to a schoolbox calendar. This might be easier on existing staff as they won't have to change their processes and we can likely test this now. (shout out to Jez Gray for pointing this out)
While Schoolbox has an integration to Edval, it isn't a great one. By this I mean it will only bring in the timetable as a calendar. If that seems like a minor issue, it's not. Schoolbox has a component that specifically display the timetable. The timetable would then feed into the school app and the class pages probably wouldn't link to the calendar as they do with the timetable. (shout out to Jez Gray for pointing this out)
Additions or subtractions for Revision #3
Possible issues with Version 3
While I think this is close, my current concerns would be:
Development work is still occuring between Veracross and Schoolbox. I'm not sure if this will include the Daily Org yet, which is certainly an important component of this.
Development work is occuring with consent2go. It's in their interest to do this. I'm not that concerned, but I'll be watching this space.
Music tutors is still outstanding.
Parent Teacher Interviews through Paperly seems good in theory, but we haven't tested this theory.
Staff Calendar Challenges
So that takes care of the students and parents, but not staff. One challenge that has always been a constant for me working in schools is trying to schedule meetings between Academic Staff (teachers and assistants) and non-academic staff (support staff/non-teaching staff).
Academic staff don’t use a traditional calendar such as outlook or google calendar. Non-academic staff do. If you are a non-academic staff and attempt to schedule a meeting with an academic staff member, this is hard. Add in a mix of several staff and your free time will indeed become an illusion as lose chunks of your day evaporate while you attempt to organize a single meeting and then it is likely to shift anyhow.
The Solution
The solution that some have used is to take the teachers’ timetable and dump that into their personal calendar (Outlook or Google Calendar). But the timetable does not capture everything, so we have only just started. Given that we have already done this work for the students and put the information into Schoolbox in the above example, we can be lazy systems administrators (in a good way) and leverage this work for the staff members. All we really need to do then is to pull Schoolbox’s calendar and import it into Outlook or Gmail with an API. This is all very feasible, but it does take writing a bit of code.
Schoolbox happens to have a publicly accessible and well documented API https://api.schoolbox.com.au/.
Google Calendars API documentation is here: (you shouldn't need this for the student/parent calendar, but you might need this if you are modifying the Academic staff's personal calendar)
and if you use M365 (outlook) the API documentation is here:
A Side Bonus: Presence
Most modern phone systems can check your calendar to see if you are in a meeting and will respond as if you were busy. This concept, called "presence," saves you from interruptions during meetings and also saves the person trying to contact you some time waiting while your phone redirects their call to voice
Questions:
Q: Why not just subscribe to the Schoolbox calendar, it’s easy and doesn’t require any coding?
A: If you simply subscribe to the Schoolbox calendar in this case, the benefits are limited. It’s like having access to your boss’ calendar. You know what is supposed to happen, but it won’t necessarily benefit you and others trying to book a meeting with you. Also, it would mean creating instructions and asking all your staff to subscribe, which many wouldn’t do (because the benefits are mainly go to other people) and the time that it would take for staff to do this, would have exceeded the cost of writing the code anyhow.
Issues:
The ground is shifting. Veracross and many edtech companies are all working very hard developing integrations. While this is great news, it also means that decisions based on today’s information might be changed tomorrow. Already my designs for how Carey might use their calendar have changed a few times as more information emerges related to their context and information about API and Integration capabilities and limitations.
Development needs to occur for Paperly’s music module to integrate with Schoolbox’s calendar. I’m guessing that it will work and that the solution will be better than simply using Veracross’ existing tools. As I haven’t seen demo’s of either the Paperly Music management module or the equivalent on Veracross. This may need to be rethought.
The Digistorm EduApp is slated for some improvements that we don’t have full visibility of. In our example TES (edval) parent app has no integrations. That isn’t ideal for our model. With other options available for parent teacher interviews, this is likely an area that would change.
Some of this may involve changing processes. Staff currently use google calendar to manage the school calendars and not Schoolbox. No firm decision has yet been made so it is entirely possible that staff will continue to various google calendars to maintain the school calendars and that an integration will need to be written to push google calendar information into Schoolbox.
Take-aways
Taming the school calendar is about cultivating smoother communication and a stronger school community.
With the right tools, clear strategies, and possibly a little help from Parker IT, you can transform the chaos of calendars into a golden path of order and purpose.
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