This is a far more efficient method, where the school itself takes on a central role of organising the interview schedule for all the teachers together. This can be done manually, or via scheduling software that does not provide any automated scheduling features.

An example of computer assisted scheduling is www.cbfsoftware.com,

(Why give links to competitors? We know we are the best! Do your own research. We are also research focused, and alternatives are part of our research)

Advantages

• Educationally better.
  • Students are removed from direct involvement in the scheduling process. This is significant, meaning those in educational need are more likely to have interviews.
• More efficient for parents.
  • Parents are scheduled with all interviews considered together,  which results in far more efficient parent schedules.
• Central control.
  • The school has control over all teacher schedules, and parents also feel the school is in control as they are directly managed.

Disadvantages

• Administratively costly.
  • Significant administrative effort in organising the event, requiring office staff to man phones for several days, during the event booking period.
• Inefficient for teachers.
  • This approach is more efficient for parents, but is incapable of easily managing efficient teacher schedules for those with less interview requests. Some teachers may have long gaps yet more efficient methods would have them start later or depart much earlier.
• Phone congestion.
  • Difficulties as many parents contact the school at the same time - all trying to get in early to get good schedule times, and interviews with teachers they want to see.
  • Difficulty with time to phone - parents need to phone in early to get interviews they want, and get good times, but many working parents are unable to phone in the early morning.
• No staff input.
  • Teachers can’t easily pre-nominate or discourage unnecessary interviews, as they have no direct control of the scheduling process.
• Office errors.
  • Admin staff may not record parent or child names properly, hand schedules to teachers too late for planning, or may double book.
• Inefficient reporting.
• While still a manual process, the school does have the ability to examine the centralised schedules to determine who has not requested interviews. This is generally too much work so schools generally do not have the benefit of any form of analysis.
Poor travel time control.
• Manual systems do not generally consider suitable travel time between interviews, which can result in blow outs in schedules if parents are late moving between their appointments. Participants will often try to schedule interviews sequentially but these could be located in different rooms, which is not an easy consideration to manage manually.
• Often a few late parents can push a schedule into total dissaray as everyone has an expectation of achieving their assigned interviews, even if the start time has aleady passed.
• More organised scheduling systems manage travel time correctly to enforce adequate movement time between interviews, including recognising more travel time is needed if sequential interviews are in different rooms or areas.
• This acts as an additional control to prevent travel delays or confusion from blowing out schedules.