This is by far the most common form of parent teacher scheduling. Both students and teachers have a paper schedule form. Students approach all their teachers in turn, and negotiate a suitable time for both.

Advantages

• Simple to organise.
  • There is no central administration as work is distributed to participants to work out among themselves.
• Instant feedback.
  • No delay in getting interview times - instantly determined
• Full control.
  • Teachers agree on times. (Schedule knowledge and control)

Disadvantages

• Educationally poor.
  • Students are directly involved in the scheduling process. Poor or disorganised students are not motivated to organise their schedules efficiently. Students may choose to be too late to organise an interview, or advise teachers were ‘booked out’ if they know the teacher may speak negative about their performance.
  • The end result is an evening where all the good parents attend, while parents who have students in real ‘educational need’ are far less likely to be in attendance – primarily due to the student led approach to scheduling.
• Very inefficient for parents.
  • Students can only negotiate with one teacher at a time, so can’t easily schedule runs of sequential interviews with teachers. As all teachers take bookings around the same time, parents often end up with long waits in their schedules. This causes event congestion with many parents milling around, or conversely results in parents electing not to have interviews on the basis they would have to ‘...wait another hour just to see Mr Smith’ etc.
• Inefficient for teachers.
  • Teacher schedules are very inefficient unless they are heavily booked, so some may be waiting for long periods between interviews.
• Inefficient for families.
  • Two or more children in a family cannot easily organise compact times as each performs the process independently.
  • Parents of twins or siblings are very disadvantaged in interview nights as they often spend all night at the event, or decide to miss some interviews.
• Unfair.
  • This system favours those who submit early and disadvantages those who submit later. This can be seen as good for encouraging the task to be done early, but does not fairly allocate interviews according to the needs of all.
  • Many parents may be late submitting due to work or ill health or being away, or forms are submitted late by their child. Allowing early submitters free reign while late submitters have no available interview times left (or unreasonable waiting times) may serve an administrative efficiency, instead of educational efficiency which is what the event is really based on.
• Poor reporting.
• The school doesn’t really know which parents never attend interviews.
• 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.