Improved timetabling at the University of Kent

This year, the University of Kent achieved something remarkable. Their timetable was published eight weeks earlier than usual. Student clashes fell by 99.5%. The burden of early starts and late finishes eased dramatically, with 63% fewer 9am classes and a 78% reduction in 5pm sessions. Students can now plan their lives with confidence, and staff finally have the space to prepare and balance their commitments.

As Kyra Harwood-Lucas, Associate Director of Academic Registry, puts it:

“We’ve produced a timetable that is better for everyone. Students can better prepare for their studies. Staff have more time to plan teaching and balance commitments. Everyone benefits from greater clarity and confidence heading into the year.”

These outcomes belong to Kent. Their ambition, their people, their dedication to implement a better way of working, and their willingness to try a different approach.

We were proud to support them along the way, as part of their Education Modernisation Programme. Our role wasn’t to tweak the administration of timetabling, something universities have tried many times, but to help hold up a mirror to the whole system. Part of our involvement was to run cross-team Value Stream Mapping workshops, we worked with them to surface the pressures, principles, and competing priorities that make timetabling feel “impossible” when you’re inside it. That clarity gave their teams a shared foundation: a way to make principled decisions about variables and constraints, simplify what could be simplified, and design a way of working that made sense for their students and their staff.

Kyra describes this experience far better than we can:

“The immersive approach means you’ve really understood the problems we face. It feels like we’re being heard.”

This is the heart of timetabling. Not solving a puzzle with perfect inputs (because perfection doesn’t exist), but creating a fair, transparent, principle-led timetable that helps everyone do their best work within the real-world constraints of university life.

If rethinking your approach to timetabling is on the agenda, we’d love to explore what a review could unlock for you. Just drop us a line at hello@ad-esse.com, and one of our team will be in touch.