Booking casual relief teachers just got even easier. Meet your school’s new favourite feature: Smart Groups.
We’re always listening to feedback from the schools and teachers that use ClassCover so we can continue to make your life easier. One thing that has been on the rise post-COVID is frustration with unfilled bookings. We hear you and have introduced Smart Groups as a way to help schools automate the booking process, ensuring you get the right teacher for the job, faster than ever.
Watch as Billie from the ClassCover team gives you a walkthrough of Smart Groups 
What is Smart Groups?
Smart Groups is a new way for schools to sort the teachers on their list, saving time and ensuring the best person is always booked for the job. Let’s say you need to book a French-speaking teacher and you only have a few minutes to do it. Rather than sorting through your full teacher list and manually sending a booking request to every teacher who fits the bill, Smart Groups lets you create a group for French-speaking teachers and send the booking request to all of them.
You can even break your Smart Groups into Preferred and Backup Lists, ensuring that if you have a favourite teacher or teachers, they will see the booking request first—more on that below.
By helping schools like yours better sort your teachers and pinpoint who receives booking requests, Smart Groups will lead to fewer unfilled bookings and ensure the right teacher is booked for the job.
Creating a Smart Group
Let’s take a closer look at how you can create your Smart Groups. Every Smart Group you create will consist of two lists: Preferred and Backup. Teachers on your Preferred list will receive all booking requests first. There is no limit on the number of teachers you can add to your Preferred list, simply add your favourite teachers from your Teacher List when creating your Smart Group.
In order to minimise unfilled booking requests, we have built a Backup list into Smart Groups. If your booking goes unfilled after being sent to your Preferred list, it will then automatically be sent to the teachers on your Backup list after the booking has closed.
Another option when creating a Smart Group is to create groups for individual teachers. If you make a group for every teacher that is able to fill in for Mr Brown’s class, next time he is sick or away on a PD course, you can easily send out a booking request to the entire group and get a teacher that you know is up to the job.
Making a Booking Using Smart Groups
Now, when you go to your Bookings screen, you will see a Smart Group field amongst the options at the top of the page. Selecting the Smart Group you want to use from the dropdown will automatically filter your Teacher List and show you only those in your group that are available to work. If there are inactive teachers in your group, you will be prompted to send them a nudge to update their availability.
As normal, you have the option to send the booking to your entire Preferred List at once or send them one at a time with a delay in between. You can also choose how long the booking remains open for. If no teachers on your Preferred List accept the booking before it closes, the request will automatically be sent to your entire Backup List at once.
What sort of Smart Groups can you create?
For a particular year level
One of the areas you will find that Smart Groups saves time is when it is used to cover a particular year level—or group of similar year levels. When creating your group, just add all the teachers that are able to and interested in teaching that year level. Next time you need to fill a class for that year, you can quickly send the booking request to all the suitable teachers.
For a subject
Filling a class that not every educator can teach—like a language or music—can be an arduous task. Smart Groups makes it easy to sort all the teachers that are able to teacher a particular subject, like French for example, so you can fill the class in minutes.
For a teacher
Another way to use Smart Groups is by creating a group for each of your classroom teachers. When that teacher is off sick or needs covering for whatever reason, you can easily send out a booking request to the group of educators you know are qualified to teach that particular class. We have even made it easy for school administrators to give classroom teachers access to this part of the system, meaning your classroom teachers can even book a relief teacher to cover their own class.
Smart Groups is now live! Head to your Bookings page to get started.
