By Helen Kirby-Hawkins
Timetabling and student engagement have always been closer companions than most people realise. In many universities, these functions sit in different parts of the organisation, separated by structure if not by purpose. Yet in practice, we are working on the same challenge: how to create and maintain the conditions in which students can genuinely engage, participate, and succeed. Over the years, I’ve come to see that belonging, engagement, and success are not simply the product of good teaching or strong curriculum design — they are shaped by the institutional structures that scaffold students’ lives. And few structures shape those lives more directly than the timetable.
The timetable governs the rhythm of a student’s week. It determines when they are on campus and how their independent study, work, caring responsibilities, and rest fit around their learning schedule. It is the architecture that holds their routine together. Yet despite this, timetabling is still too often framed as a logistical exercise: rooms, timeslots, staff availability, student clashes. A technical puzzle to be solved behind the scenes, often under intense pressure, and frequently re‑worked after publication to accommodate a cascade of changes due to unforeseen or emergent issues. The student is often a passive recipient of a finished artefact.
I understand why this happens. Timetabling is complex. It relies on specialist systems, specialist knowledge, and a constant balancing of competing demands. But this technical framing has a cost: it obscures the human impact of the timetable. It risks minimising students to “objects” within a system rather than people whose capacity to engage is shaped by the stability of the structures around them. Many institutions talk about “good timetables,” but what counts as “good” varies wildly depending on institutional priorities, student demographics, and local constraints. In truth, the only time a timetable is considered good is when it is invisible, when it quietly supports learning without drawing attention to itself. Bad timetabling, on the other hand, is instantly visible. Anyone who has ever scheduled a 7pm lecture in the coldest room on campus at the start of Semester 2 knows exactly what I mean!
Whatever we call it, one thing is certain: the timetable is not neutral. It is one of the most powerful engagement interventions an institution has. And crucially, it is one of the few interventions we can proactively design in advance.
Contemporary engagement theory and growing research on lifeload, disruptiveness, and habit formation shows that the timetables shapes students’ cognitive, emotional, and practical capacity to participate. As Bovill (2020) reminds us, predictability is not a luxury. It is a condition for engagement. And the timetable is the primary way universities deliver that predictability.
A timetable is a form of temporal architecture. It is the scaffold students use to organise their lives, regulate their cognitive load, and distribute their limited bandwidth across multiple identities and responsibilities. When that scaffold is stable, students can engage. When it is unstable, engagement becomes structurally inhibited. Put simply: a timetable is not just a schedule. It is an engagement infrastructure. And when it shifts, engagement is at risk of collapse. Many institutions struggle with a high frequency of post‑publication timetable changes. Within the timetabling community, we talk about this constantly and no institutions appears to have a single solution. All practitioners share concerns about the pressures of student number volatility, curriculum complexity and staff constraints, the size and shape of the university estate and making a feasible timetable that satisfies most of those most of them time and is at best, the least worst option for all. But the impact on students is often less visible to those outside engagement work. That’s where the two worlds need to come together more.
Why Timetabling Matters for Engagement
Predictability reduces cognitive load. Students rely on a stable timetable to coordinate work, caring responsibilities, commuting, study routines, and emotional pacing. Bovill’s work shows that predictability frees up bandwidth for learning and students tell us this directly in feedback. “We need more notice for timetable changes; I can cope if I know what’s coming” is one of the most consistent pieces of feedback I hear from students.
Unpredictability does the opposite. It drains bandwidth by increasing the cognitive and emotional labour required simply to stay organised. It also destabilises the environmental conditions needed for habits to form, making engagement even harder to sustain.
Timetable stability is therefore a bandwidth‑preserving mechanism. In my previous blog and in my paper Riding the Carousel, I noted that students with high lifeloads: carers, commuters, neurodivergent learners, students in precarious work, operate with reduced spare capacity and have to juggle many competing identities. When the timetable shifts, they experience logistical conflict, emotional destabilisation, and increased stress. Cognitive presence drops. Engagement becomes harder to sustain. And when something must give, university is often the least disruptive thing to step back from. There is also the “I’ll just watch it later” effect. When a timetable change pushes a student into conflict, the availability of online recordings can feel like a safety net. But many students report that the time to catch up never comes. The intention is there; the bandwidth is not.
Disruptiveness: The Hidden Mechanism Behind Engagement Collapse
Disruptiveness describes the extent to which an institutional action forces a student to reorganise their life, redistribute their bandwidth, or renegotiate responsibilities. I believe that it is not simply the size or frequency of a timetable change that matters it is the disruption score and reconfiguration cost for the student that directly impacts engagement. This reframes how we think about timetable changes. They are not neutral adjustments within a system to remove a clash. They are behavioural shocks to the students who experience them. I found that different types of changes carry different behavioural weights, and compound changes can be hugely disruptive. Early‑semester changes, day and time shifts, and changes affecting large cohorts are particularly destabilising because they disrupt the cues students rely on to form habits. Habit discontinuity theory reinforces this: small contextual changes can derail emerging routines, especially during transitions. Even seemingly minor adjustments, a room change, a timeslot shift of an hour can negatively affect engagement for students who struggle with change. A student may attend the new session, but if they now must rush to childcare, work, or transport, their cognitive engagement may be diminished in ways attendance data cannot capture.
This is why disruptiveness is the mechanism through which timetable instability becomes an engagement issue. It explains sudden drops in attendance, reduced cognitive presence, and early disengagement. It shows why timetable stability is not an operational aspiration for timetablers but a pedagogical necessity as a prerequisite for engagement.
Attendance as a Weakening Proxy for Engagement Under Timetable Instability
A disrupted or unstable timetable also reduces the extent to which attendance can be meaningfully interpreted as engagement. Attendance monitoring is behavioural: it records only whether a student attended the activity we scheduled, not whether they had the cognitive capacity to engage.
Instability fractures routines, reduces bandwidth, and forces students to absorb reconfiguration costs that many simply cannot carry. As a result, students may miss sessions not because they are unmotivated or disconnected, but because the conditions required for attendance have been undermined. In this context, attendance stops functioning as engagement data and becomes outcome data, a downstream indicator of institutional conditions rather than a reliable measure of student intent. In my view, the more volatile and disrupted the timetable is, the weaker attendance becomes as a proxy for engagement and is more a reflection of disruption tolerance and resilience.
Positive Dynamism: When Change Helps Rather Than Harms
While stability is the foundation of an engagement‑supportive timetable, this does not mean timetables must be static. Some changes can actively enhance engagement, for example, responding to student feedback by moving a session into a more preferred time slot, improving travel feasibility, or shifting a class online or into a hybrid format when this better supports students’ circumstances.
These adjustments can improve engagement, and the cost of disruption is minimal. They can lead to higher attendance, stronger participation, and a more inclusive learning environment. A degree of dynamism is therefore not only acceptable but beneficial, provided it is used for in‑year improvements that strengthen the conditions for engagement rather than undermine them. Stability remains the core principle, but continuous improvement, when carefully targeted, can make the timetable more humane, more predictable, and more aligned with students’ real lives.
Timetabling as Safeguarding and Belonging
A stable timetable is not just an operational convenience it is also a form of safeguarding for students. Predictability reduces anxiety, supports routine, anchors vulnerable learners, and prevents overwhelm. For many students, timetable instability is not a minor inconvenience but a genuine risk factor that undermines their ability to cope. Stability communicates safety. It also communicates belonging. Students feel they belong when they know where to be, what to expect, and how to plan. A timetable that changes frequently sends the opposite message: you cannot rely on us. When institutional reliability collapses, students’ sense of belonging collapses with it and engagement follows thereafter. Safeguarding and belonging are inseparable: both depend on the institution providing a stable temporal environment that students can trust.
Conclusion: A Call to the Sector
Timetabling is often treated as an operational necessity, but the evidence is clear: it is one of the most powerful engagement levers a university holds. When we view student engagement through the lenses of lifeload, bandwidth, disruptiveness, and habit formation, the timetable stops looking like an administrative artefact and starts looking like a core scaffold to both the learning environment and student’s wellbeing.
A stable timetable protects students’ bandwidth, supports habit formation, and created predictability on which students rely to manage their complex lives. Instability, by contrast, introduces disruptiveness, forcing students to reorganise their responsibilities, renegotiate their routines and jump between their various conflicting identities, and absorb cognitive and emotional shocks that many simply do not have the capacity to withstand. For students with high lifeload, even small changes can tip the balance from participation to withdrawal. Their disengagement is not a failure of motivation; it is a breach of capacity.
Engagement is not something students simply “choose” to do. It is something institutions enable or inhibit through the structures they design. The timetable is one of those structures. It shapes predictability, belonging, emotional safety, and the practical feasibility of students being able to participate in learning.
If we want students to engage, we must create the conditions in which engagement is possible. That means treating timetabling not as a back‑office function but as a pedagogical responsibility. Stability, clarity, and consistency are not unachievable idealistic expectations; they are engagement interventions that we as institutions should strive to upload and protect.
About the Author
Helen Kirby-Hawkins is the Assistant Director in Education Services at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work focuses on the intersection of operations research, student engagement, and behavioural science. She specialises in timetabling, habit formation, student lifeload and safeguarding, with a commitment to embedding human‑centric approaches into institutional policy and practice.
References
Bovill, C. (2020). Co-creation in learning and teaching: The case for a whole-class approach. Higher Education, 79(6), 1023–1037. (Used for predictability as a condition for engagement.)
Fiorella, L. (2020). The science of habit and its implications for student learning. Educational Psychology Review, 32, 603–625. (Used for contextual stability and habit disruption.)
Kahu, E. (2013). Framing student engagement in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 38(5), 758–773. (Used for lifeload and engagement.)
Kirby‑Hawkins, H. (2024). Riding the Carousel: Understanding Lifeload and Student Engagement. (Used for lifeload, bandwidth, and disengagement mechanisms.)
Kirby‑Hawkins, H. (2024). Disruptiveness: A Behavioural Lens on Institutional Change. (Used for disruptiveness and reconfiguration cost.)
Kirby‑Hawkins, H. (2025). Don’t Make the Same Mistake Twice: How Timetable Changes Influence Habit Formation in University Students. (Used for behavioural weighting of timetable changes and early‑semester volatility.)
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. (Used for habit formation timelines.)
Verplanken, B., & Wood, W. (2006). Interventions to break and create consumer habits. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 25(1), 90–103. (Used for habit discontinuity theory.)Timetabling for Student Engagement: Why Timetable Stability is a Prerequisite for positive student engagement.
