For generations secondary school timetables have been constructed from a limited number of standardised blocks of time (50 minutes is popular) serving fixed groupings of students. Timetables are imposed upon the teachers who generally have little say in their construction. They are usually fixed for a whole year, do not respond to the students’ needs and restrict collaboration between departments.

We believe that timetabling no longer has to be like this. Stonerock Education is a project looking at radically different methods for organising and structuring the school day. Our vision is to empower teachers and enable students to each have their own personalised schedules.

The project is led by Kerstyn Comley PhD a mechanical engineer with 20 years of experience in optimisation and modelling. In 2010 Kerstyn co-founded the Wapping and Shadwell Secondary Education Trust which went on to open Wapping High School. Inspired by her experience working with schools and teachers Kerstyn set herself the challenge of applying her engineering expertise to identify news ways in which schools can create personalised and creative timetables.

Ian Comley has spent the last 20 years working in the fields of computer science and financial analysis. His expertise include optimisation, software development and data analysis. Ian’s specific interest in the project is to develop the optimisation algorithms used by the scheduling software.