May 8, 2026

Pre-booking Interviews (Push Request System)

Pre-booking automatically creates interview appointments on behalf of parents, based on
the meeting requests generated by the Push Request process. Instead of parents selecting
their own times, the system allocates a compact block of consecutive (or near-consecutive)
appointments for each family.

Your first question might be: “Why would you do this?”  Well, that was my first question
when I heard about it.  The answer was simple enough – greater engagement from parents!

Before you begin

The following must be in place before pre-booking can run:

• Push requests generated — use Step 2: Generate push requests
  on the booking round to create the meeting requests for each student and teacher.
• Time slots defined — the booking round must have time slots set up.
  These may be shared slots (available to all teachers) or teacher-specific slots.
• Teacher availability entered — teachers should have marked their
  available/unavailable times. The system cannot book a slot where there is no availability.

Running pre-booking

Click on Push Requests (row #20) to view the list of Push Requests.  In the top right of the
table open the menu and select  Pre-book interviews. A confirmation
dialog appears before any bookings are made, showing:

• Pending meeting requests — the total number of unbooked, unskipped
  meetings for this round.
• Bookable percentage — the proportion of those meetings that can be
  matched to an available slot. At least 80% must be bookable to proceed; below this
  threshold the system will not run.

Errors (must be resolved before proceeding)

• Fewer than 80% of meeting requests have available time slots — ensure teachers have
  entered their availability and that sufficient slots exist.

Warnings (you may still proceed)

• Some meetings have already been pre-booked — these will not be changed.
• One or more teachers have meeting requests but are not in the involved staff list —
  their meetings will be skipped.
• One or more teachers have no time slots — their meetings will be skipped.
• One or more teachers have no remaining availability — their meetings will be
  skipped.

If there are only warnings (no errors), click Pre-book interviews to
proceed. Click Return to go back and resolve any issues first.

How appointments are allocated

The scheduler works through each family in order of most meetings first (families with
more teachers to see are scheduled first, as they are harder to fit in). For each family
it finds the most compact available block of time — appointments are grouped as closely
together as possible rather than being spread across the session. Any gap between
consecutive meetings (configured on the booking round as Parent gap) is
respected.

If a family cannot be fully scheduled — for example because a particular teacher has no
remaining capacity — the meetings that could not be placed are reported as incomplete.

After pre-booking

A summary is shown when the run completes, stating how many meetings were pre-booked
and how many (if any) could not be scheduled. You can then view the push request list to
see the full results, and send booking notifications to parents in the usual way.

Re-running pre-booking

Pre-booking can be run more than once. Meetings that have already been booked are
skipped — only the remaining unbooked, unskipped meeting requests are processed. This
means you can re-run after resolving issues (such as a teacher adding more availability)
without disturbing existing bookings.