Why I Built a Planboard Alternative for UK Teachers

When I started looking properly at the planning and task apps teachers were being pointed towards, the same pattern kept showing up. Nearly all of them, including some genuinely well-built ones, had been designed around the American school year. Semesters instead of terms. State curriculum standards instead of exam board specifications. A calendar that assumes the same five day week runs from September to June with no half term break in the middle of it. None of that is a criticism of the tools themselves. It just is not how a school in Leeds, Cardiff or Belfast actually runs.

That gap is why I built Teacher Task Manager, and it is worth explaining properly rather than just asserting it, because "built for the UK" can mean almost anything on a landing page.

Terms are not semesters

The most basic structural difference is the shape of the year itself. UK schools run on three terms, Autumn, Spring and Summer, each split roughly in half by a week's holiday. That gives six blocks of teaching a year, not two long semesters or four quarters. A half term in late October changes how a scheme of work has to be paced in a way a straight fifteen week semester never does: you are planning six teaching weeks, not eight, before the next natural break. Software built around semesters does not just use the wrong label, it structures deadlines, progress tracking and pacing around a rhythm that does not match the one your school actually follows.

INSET days do not exist in the US the way they do here

Every UK school sets its own INSET, training, days, usually five a year, and they move depending on the school or trust, not a national calendar. The nearest US equivalent, a professional development day, tends to be set centrally by a district and is far less likely to be sprung on you with a week's notice through a staff WhatsApp group. A planner that has never heard of an INSET day cannot warn you one is coming, because nothing in its data model expects a day where pupils simply are not in but staff are.

Exam boards, not state standards

Curriculum tagging is where the US first design shows up most clearly. Planboard, to take the example most UK teachers will actually have tried, lets you tag lessons against state and provincial standards, because that is how curriculum accountability works in the US and Canada. In the UK, GCSEs and A levels sit under AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC or one of the other exam boards, each with its own specification and assessment objectives. A UK teacher trying to use a standards first US tool ends up either leaving that field blank or picking the least wrong option from a list that was never built with their qualification in mind.

Timetables run on weeks, not just days

Plenty of UK secondary schools run a two week timetable, Week A and Week B, where a Tuesday period 3 might be Maths one week and PE the next. It is a completely normal way to fit a crowded curriculum into a five day week, and it is also something a lot of American built scheduling tools simply do not model, because the assumption baked in is that Monday looks like Monday every single week. Get that assumption wrong and every deadline reminder, every "what have I got today" view, is quietly incorrect every other week.

Even the vocabulary carries assumptions.

Ask an American engineer to build a field called "SATs" and they will, entirely reasonably, think of a US college admissions test. In England it means the Standard Assessment Tests sat by seven and eleven year olds at the end of Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, something else entirely. It is a small thing, but it is exactly the kind of detail that tells you who a tool was really built for.

Why this became a product decision, not a feature request

None of this is fixable by adding a UK flag toggle to a US built tool, because the gap is not cosmetic. It sits in the data model itself: how terms are structured, how a week repeats, what a deadline is measured against. So Teacher Task Manager was built the other way round from the start, UK term dates and INSET days as the base structure, Week A/Week B timetables as a first class option, and workload, marking and deadlines tracked around teaching weeks rather than a generic calendar month. Lesson planning sits inside that structure rather than being the entire product, which is also where it differs most from a dedicated lesson planner like Planboard: that comparison between Teacher Task Manager and Planboard for UK schools sets out the detail on where each tool is actually strongest.

The honest bottom line

I am not arguing every US built planning tool is bad. Several are well made and do their one job well. But a tool designed around semesters, state standards and a fixed weekly timetable will always be translating UK school life into a shape it was not built for, and that translation cost lands on the teacher every single week. Building around UK terms, exam boards and real timetables from day one was the only way to remove that cost rather than just hide it.