Features
Skeme exists to do one thing well: put your curriculum onto your timetable, and keep it there when term gets in the way.
Automatic scheduling
This is the heart of it. Rather than writing each lesson into a planner by hand, you build your curriculum once and apply it to a class.
You can apply:
- A single lesson, dropped onto the next available period
- A whole topic at a time
- Your entire teaching order, laid across the term in sequence
Skeme works out which periods that class has, in what order, and fills them in. What took an evening with a planner and a pen takes a few taps.
Bumping
Plans slip. There is an assembly, a fire drill, a trip, a snow day, or a cover lesson that eats your Tuesday.
Bump a lesson forwards and everything after it moves along with it, into that class's next period. Bump backwards and it pulls the sequence back. You are not re-entering a term's worth of planning because you lost a week to mock exams.
Locking
Some lessons must not move. Lock a period — a test, a revision lesson, an assessment window — and bumping steps over it, leaving it exactly where it is while everything around it shifts.
Views
Four ways to look at the same planning, depending on what you are actually trying to do:
- Day view — on iPhone, and portrait on iPad. What you are teaching today, in the order you will teach it.
- Week view — landscape on iPad. The whole week at a glance.
- Class group view — the full lesson sequence for one class. Where forward planning, swapping lessons and setting homework actually happens.
- Timetable view — tap a class and every period you teach them lights up. For when you need to know when you next see them.
Tasks
Tasks are scheduled to particular days and appear in day and week view when they are due. Once a deadline passes they show as overdue rather than quietly vanishing.
Recurring tasks
Set tasks weekly or fortnightly, or tie them to one week of a two-week timetable. They run during term time and stop over the holidays.
Preparation tasks
The ones that save the most grief. Attach a task to a lesson in your curriculum and it schedules itself relative to when that lesson falls:
- A set number of days before — photocopying that needs doing three days ahead, wherever the lesson lands.
- On a particular day the week before — for weekly cut-offs, like equipment that must be ordered by Monday.
Because they are attached to the lesson rather than to a date, they follow the lesson when it gets bumped.
Homework
Homework can be set as a task, so you are reminded when it was set and when it is due back.
Events and the school calendar
Enter your school calendar once and the rest of the app respects it. Switch any day from a teaching day to a professional or non-teaching day, and lessons bump around it automatically.
Quick Setup
Setting up the shape of the academic year takes minutes, not an evening:
- Choose a one-week or two-week timetable
- Add or remove teaching periods, breaks, lunches and tutor periods
- Set your term start and end dates
- Two-week timetables alternate automatically
- Toggle individual weeks as break weeks to fill the calendar in quickly
Then you add your timetable, creating class groups as you go. Each group's name is entered once — never twice.
Your school's words
Schools do not agree on what to call things, so Skeme asks. Tutor time, homeroom or roll call; break, recess or morning tea; term, semester or quarter; training day, PD day or pupil-free day. Choose your education system during setup and the app uses your vocabulary throughout.
Curriculum
Your curriculum is kept separate from your scheduling, so it can be reused year after year rather than rebuilt.
- Each class group belongs to a course — typically their year group
- Each course has topics
- Each topic holds as many lessons and homework tasks as you need
Detailed lesson planning is available in lesson view if you want it. Most teachers keep their lesson structure in PowerPoint and use Skeme for the scheduling — that is what it is built for.
Sync and sharing
Skeme syncs through your own iCloud account, so your planning is on your iPhone and your iPad without you doing anything about it.
Import and export lets you share calendar dates and topics with colleagues. One person sets up the department's curriculum, everyone else imports it, and the whole team saves hours of duplicated typing.
Price
£19.99 a year or £2.99 a month in the UK. Prices vary by country. The yearly plan starts with a 14-day free trial; the monthly plan does not include one.
That is roughly what a paper planner costs — except this one reschedules itself.
If a subscription lapses, your planning stays readable. Nothing is deleted or locked away — you simply cannot edit until you resubscribe, and when you do, everything is where you left it.
Something missing? Tell us — feature requests get read.