Teachers: Substitution Duties
How you find out you are covering a class, what an early departure means for your day, and where the cover plan comes from.
Last updated Sat Sep 05
How you find out
Cover appears in My Timetable as a period marked SUB, on the day it applies. It is not emailed to you and it is not in your standing timetable — so check My Timetable in the morning, not only at the start of term.
Some institutes also print the day's plan and put it in the staffroom; the printed plan and My Timetable come from the same place.
Where it comes from
Each morning, whoever runs cover opens Teachers → Substitution. The screen lists every period left uncovered by an absent colleague — period, time, class and subject — and proposes suggested substitutes for each. Suggestions are teachers who are free at that time and who teach that subject; the person building the plan can also pick any teacher instead.
The plan is then saved, which is when it reaches your timetable. Until it is saved, nothing appears for you.
Early departures
A colleague who leaves partway through the day is handled separately — their remaining periods are added to the plan as an early departure, mid-morning. So a SUB period can appear in your day after the day has already started. That is the one case where the timetable you checked at 8am is genuinely out of date by 11.
What covering actually means
A SUB period is somebody else's class in somebody else's room:
- It disappears from your week once that day's plan does.
- Attendance for that class stays with its own class teacher — you are not marking the register unless you have been asked to.
- If you think an assignment is wrong or impossible — you are already teaching then, you are off site — say so to whoever built the plan. You cannot change it from your side, and that is intentional: only the plan owner can see whether moving you creates a new gap.