Increasingly, we are seeing schools turn to technological methods of teaching, communicating, reporting, monitoring students’ progress and behaviour and, well, pretty much every other aspect of school life too. With students being permitted to use personal devices for educational purposes in many schools, and homework and lesson tasks being set online, technology has become an integral part of the way teachers teach and students learn. Ask a 21st Century student to conduct their homework using only an encyclopaedia, no doubt they’ll look at you confused and aghast.

Putting a seating plan together is often a headache for teachers; do you organise randomly, alphabetically, by gender, or by ability, for instance? It is often seen as a laborious task, and yet the impact of a good seating plan in the classroom is somewhat underestimated; it’s a practical way to help teachers manage the class, and depending on how sophisticated the plan itself is, can allow quick access to a range of student information such as grades achieved.