Assigning pupils to tutor groups in a comprehensive school

Comprehensive schools in the UK have the annual task of assigning their intake of new pupils to tutor groups. This case study describes how the problem has been addressed at one such school, where several factors are taken into account in order to make the groups as similar as possible and, since pupils have an induction day in June when they assemble in their tutor groups and meet their new tutors, where the time scale is short. Manual allocation has been used in the past, needing many staff-hours to achieve a satisfactory result. Heuristics implemented on a spreadsheet have enabled substantial savings in staff time and given more evenly balanced tutor groups.