What to Include in a Teacher Planner

What each section is actually for

A teacher planner exists to reduce the number of decisions a teacher has to make under pressure. The sections inside it should reflect how your school operates — not how a generic publisher thinks most schools work.

That distinction shapes what belongs. Sections that support daily and weekly decisions earn their place. Sections that duplicate information already held in the school’s MIS, or that exist primarily to demonstrate compliance, add weight without adding value. The test for every section is whether a teacher will open it on a Tuesday afternoon in November.

Lesson and forward planning pages

Planning pages are the foundation of most teacher planners. They should reflect the planning model your school already uses — not introduce a new one.
Common planning sections schools include:

• Weekly lesson planning templates
• Medium-term or forward planning pages
• Personal timetable
• Class lists or group records

How much space these sections need varies significantly. A secondary school with subject specialists working across multiple year groups has different requirements from a primary school where one teacher owns one class. Schools that over-specify planning pages often find staff work around them rather than adapt to them.

Marking and feedback records

Marking pages work best when they embed the school’s marking policy directly into the planner — removing the need for teachers to cross-reference a separate document during a busy day.
Common marking sections include:

• Feedback and marking records aligned to the school’s existing policy
• Assessment notes by class or group
• Follow-up and action records

If your school has invested in a marking policy, the planner is the right place to make it practical. A marking section that still requires a teacher to remember or interpret the policy is not doing its job.

Meeting notes and actions

Meeting records have a habit of ending up scattered — across loose notebooks, email threads, and memory. A dedicated section in the planner consolidates that into one working document.
Common meeting sections include:

• Staff and whole-school meeting notes
• Department or faculty meeting records
• Action and follow-up logs
• Coaching or line management notes

These sections are used less frequently than planning pages but carry disproportionate value when it matters — during an appraisal review, or when tracking whether actions from a book scrutiny were actually followed up.

Professional development and appraisal

CPD records and appraisal notes kept in separate folders or email threads create another system for staff to maintain. Bringing them into the planner removes that friction.
Common professional development sections include:

• Appraisal targets and review notes
• CPD and training records
• Reflection and professional reading logs
• Coaching and mentoring notes

These sections work best when they are concise and directly connected to school priorities. Pages that ask for open-ended reflection without structure tend not to be completed consistently — which means they do not support the development conversations they were designed for.

Sections that are often included but rarely used

Some sections appear in teacher planners by default but contribute bulk without being used. Understanding what to leave out is as important as knowing what to include.
Sections that tend to be abandoned by half-term:

• Generic behaviour logs not aligned to the school’s existing pastoral system
• Parent contact records duplicated in the MIS
• Reading record pages for secondary staff
• Goal-setting pages with no connection to the appraisal structure

If a section requires explanation at a September briefing, it is unlikely to be used independently by March. That space would serve the school better elsewhere.

How role affects what belongs in the planner

Most schools use a single core layout across all teaching staff. Where roles differ significantly in daily responsibilities, a small number of variations is usually sufficient.
Common role-based differences:

• Heads of department typically need space for team meeting records and department-level tracking
• Pastoral leads need communication logs for parent and pupil contact
• Middle leaders with line management responsibilities benefit from structured notes pages for one-to-ones

Managing these as variations on a shared core — rather than entirely separate designs — keeps things consistent across the school while still reflecting how different roles actually work.

How space allocation determines whether the planner gets used

How pages are distributed across sections is one of the most common mistakes in planner design. Too much space where it is not needed, not enough where real work happens.

The clearest indicator is how previous planners were actually used. If weekly planning consistently overflows into margins, that section needs more room. If a CPD log is left blank year after year, it does not need four pages. Reviewing copies of last year’s planners — before finalising the new layout — gives more reliable information than any assumption about what staff should be doing.

The academic year as the structural foundation

A teacher planner is a dated document built around the school’s academic year. Term dates, planning cycles, assessment windows, and key calendar events need to be factored into the structure before sections are finalised.

A planner that distributes space evenly across the year will under-serve the autumn term, which carries significantly more planning and assessment weight than spring or summer. The layout needs to reflect how your year actually runs — not a uniform twelve-month spread.

What a custom planner gives you that an off-the-shelf one cannot

An off-the-shelf teacher planner uses a fixed layout built for a generic school. It reflects what the publisher assumes most teachers need, distributed across a standard year.

A custom teacher planner is built around your school — your marking policy, your meeting structures, your planning model, your term dates. When every section reflects how your school actually operates, staff use the planner consistently rather than quietly working around it. That consistency is what separates a planner that reduces workload from one that adds to it.