Guide
Looking for a playground duty roster template?
A spreadsheet template is a reasonable starting point for a simple duty roster. Here's what a good one contains, when it is enough — and the point at which most schools outgrow it.
What a basic playground duty roster needs
Whether you build it in Excel, Google Sheets or on paper, a playground duty roster needs the same information.
- The duty cycle
- Whether the roster repeats weekly or fortnightly, and — if fortnightly — which duties sit in week A and which in week B.
- Duty periods and their times
- Before school, recess, lunch (often split into two sittings) and dismissal, each with real start and finish times.
- Playground areas
- Every area needing supervision, how many staff each area takes, and which days it runs.
- Where students are
- Which year groups play in each area, so supervision matches where students actually are.
- Staff and their working days
- Who is on site each day, including part-time staff and anyone who cannot do a particular duty time.
- Duty load per person
- How many duties, or duty minutes, each person is expected to carry — proportional to their load.
- Space for the changes
- A clear way to record who covered which duty on a given day, without losing the normal roster.
When a spreadsheet works
For plenty of schools a simple grid is genuinely enough. The most readable layout puts duty periods and areas down the page and school days across the top.
- A small staff, most of them full-time
- A handful of duty areas with one staff member each
- Duty periods of roughly the same length
- Few absences, or one obvious person who covers them
- A roster you rebuild once a year rather than each term
| Duty period | Area | Mon | Tue | Wed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before school 8.25–8.50 | Front gate | R. Patel | A. Nguyen | R. Patel |
| Recess 10.45–11.05 | K–2 playground | J. Chen | J. Chen | L. Brown |
| Recess 10.45–11.05 | Oval | K. Kelly | L. Brown | K. Kelly |
| Lunch 1 12.40–1.05 | Courts | A. Nguyen | K. Kelly | J. Chen |
| Dismissal 3.00–3.20 | Bus lines | L. Brown | R. Patel | A. Nguyen |
Names are examples only. We don't publish a downloadable spreadsheet.
Where spreadsheet rostering becomes difficult
A template holds the layout, but it can't hold the rules. Everything here has to be checked by hand, every time the roster changes.
See how it works- Part-time staff who should carry proportionally less duty
- Working days, so nobody is rostered on a day they aren't in
- Staff who cannot do a particular duty time, or only on a particular day
- Different duty lengths, so a long lunch duty counts for more than a short gate duty
- Workload fairness across the whole week or fortnight
- Year-group supervision matching where students actually play
- Daily absences and finding suitable cover
- Replacements, without quietly breaking the fairness you started with
What DutyRound handles for you
You enter your school's rules once. DutyRound applies them when it builds the roster, and again when the day changes.
- Working days
- Staff are only rostered on the days they are at school.
- Part-time workload
- Duty targets scale with each person's load.
- Duty availability
- Duty times a person cannot take are never used.
- Duty lengths
- Duty minutes are counted, not just duty slots.
- Supervision numbers
- Each area's required staff count is always met.
- Student locations
- Year groups are linked to the areas they play in.
- Workload distribution
- Duties spread across days, duty times and areas.
- Daily changes
- Absences and cover for a single date, roster untouched.
See how DutyRound works
A walkthrough of setting up your staff, duty periods, areas and year-group locations, then generating, approving and printing the roster.