Enrolment and transition – Class builder

Class Builder is TrackEd’s tool for building balanced classes from a cohort by weighting fields like gender, behaviour, attendance, and academic results. It works equally well for futures Year 6 to 7 transitions, mid-year reshuffles, and any cohort across the school where you want even classes built from your existing TrackEd data.

Common use cases: Building Year 7 classes from incoming Year 6 futures cohorts, creating evenly distributed classes weighted by gender and behaviour, reserving streamed or support classes with preset student lists, generating composite classes by combining year levels, and producing class lists and ClassMats for staff review.

Note: This video was recorded in 2021 and has been flagged for replacement.

Training video — Video: Class builder [2021]

Opening Class Builder

Class Builder lives on the Reports menu on the Profile page. Pick your cohort first, then choose Class Builder from the blue options. The Class Builder page lets you revisit past allocations, add newly enrolled students into an unallocated class, or create a new allocation.

If new students have arrived in the cohort since the last build, run the relevant Student Summary import first so that those students appear and can be added to an unallocated class for shuffling. See Getting Data into TrackEd for import detail.

Setting up an allocation

Give the new allocation a name and confirm the cohort it relates to. Choose the number of classes you want from that cohort. For a cohort of 148 students with six classes, that gives roughly 25 students each.

The standard allocation method is average distributed classes, which spreads students evenly across all classes. Preset classes can also be added for any group you want to reserve before the rest of the students are distributed.

Using weightings for average distributed classes

Average distributed classes are built using weightings on the data fields you want to balance. The weightings work as a ratio, so the actual numbers do not need to add up to anything in particular. The relative size of each weighting is what controls how much it influences the spread.

Class Builder sorts students by the weighted criteria, going best-to-worst for one gender and worst-to-best for the other, and picks teams in turn. The result is classes with a strong gender balance and an even spread across whichever fields you have weighted.

Tip: Give the field you most want to balance the largest weighting. If your weightings total 90 and behaviour is set to 45, behaviour drives roughly half of the placement decisions and is well spread across the resulting classes.

Working with the class view

After clicking Continue, Class Builder shows two classes side by side. Each row shows the data from the Student Summary import, plus a learning support count column. Hovering over a learning support count reveals the individual needs, sourced from the Enrolment Interview tab or the learning support import.

Use the class drop-downs at the top of each side to pick any two classes for comparison. Drag students between the two visible classes to move them. The search boxes on each side jump straight to a named student, which is useful when you want to bring two specific students together or apart.

Add a note to a student using the note box on the page. Students with notes show a yellow highlight so they are easy to spot. Lock students to a class to prevent them from being moved further, and unlock when you need to shift them again.

The social positive and social negative columns surface students you want to keep together or keep apart. When a student you have searched is highlighted, the social columns show which other students in the cohort are linked to them. A social positive that is satisfied (both students in the same class) shows a green “keep together” highlight. If you move one of those students away, the entry turns grey to flag that the positive is now broken.

To resolve a social conflict, search for the second student on the other side, then drag the relevant student across. The highlights update as students move. For more detail on how social tags are added and managed, see Social Interactions.

Live stats while you adjust

The stats panel at the bottom of the page updates every time you move a student between classes. It shows total count, NAPLAN, English/Maths/Science averages, attendance and behaviour averages, learning support count, social positive and negative totals, male/female ratio, ATSI, EALD, OOHC, and AIM percentages.

Both classes show their stats, so you can compare side by side as you adjust and see straight away whether moving a student has improved or worsened the balance.

Reports and ClassMats

The right-hand side of the page has options to rename classes, add new enrolled students into an unallocated class, create a manual new class, and generate ClassMats. ClassMat reports can be built from a Class Builder allocation even before the school’s timetable goes live, which gives teachers an early look at next year’s classes. For more detail on configuring ClassMats, see ClassMat.

The reports menu offers several views of the allocation:

Class lists, with all students grouped by class
Detailed view, with extended student data
Social interactions view, showing positives in green and negatives in red
Summary view, with one line per class and the headline stats
Feeder school view, drawing on the feeder school field from the Enrolment Interview tab or the Extras tab on the Profile
Simple list, with space for staff to add comments by hand
List with notes, showing any notes you have entered against students

You can also export the data to Excel for further manipulation, or open student profiles directly from Class Builder. For more detail on the feeder school field and how it is captured, see Enrolment Interviews.

Preset classes for streamed or reserved groups

Preset classes let you reserve specific students to a named class before Class Builder allocates the rest. This is the way to set up streamed classes, support classes, or any group you want to lock in first.

Tick the preset classes option when setting up the allocation, name the reserved class (for example, 7A), and paste in a list of student IDs. Those students are reserved to that class, and Class Builder distributes the remaining students across the rest of the classes using whatever weightings you set. You can add more than one preset class, mixing reserved groups with average distributed classes for everyone else.

Tip: A common workflow is to run Class Builder once with a streamed weighting (such as a heavy academic weighting) to generate a top-stream class, export the result to Excel from the reports menu, then run Class Builder a second time with that ID list pasted into a preset class plus several average distributed classes for the remaining students.

Composite classes

For composite classes, build the classes within each year level first, then combine the resulting classes after the fact. For example, build Year 5 classes and Year 6 classes separately, then pair them together. This works well for primary school setups where mixed year-level classes are common.

If you are building classes for next year and need to bring incoming students into the cohort first, see Importing future students and Year 7 Futures.