Editorial perspective
The argument behind SitRep.
Every seating plan makes claims about attention, access, relationships and the kind of lesson a room should permit. Most are simply too static to admit it. SitRep treats arrangement as revisable professional judgement: grounded in the real room, assisted by explainable rules and always open to the teacher who knows the class.
The grid is never neutral
Drag a pupil's name from one square to another and the movement looks administrative. It is not. A seat can alter what a pupil can see, whom they can hear, how easily they can leave and which relationships become unavoidable for the next hour.
A static document preserves the final arrangement while losing the reasons that made it sensible. SitRep starts from the claim that a plan should remember enough to be changed intelligently. Not everything. Enough.
A generated arrangement is only a suggestion. The teacher remains responsible for the room it creates.
Begin with the room that exists
Classrooms are not abstract rectangles populated by interchangeable desks. They contain doors, boards, fixed furniture, restricted areas and access routes. Reusable, versioned layouts keep the physical space inside the decision.
A pupil can be prioritised because an approved functional instruction exists; a category such as SEND cannot become a crude rule that moves a group wholesale to the front. Human needs do not become precise merely because the coordinates are.
Explain the suggestion, preserve the override
Seating assistance is useful when it can state what it tried to do: keep these pupils apart, preserve locked seats, distribute a teacher-created planning tag. These rules are comprehensible and contestable.
SitRep's engine is deterministic and explainable, and its suggestions never silently save. The aim is not to find the one true seating plan, but to reduce the mechanical labour around a decision the teacher can defend and revise.
Privacy is also a question of purpose
A functional instruction such as seat near the exit may be necessary; the diagnostic or safeguarding history behind it is not. Names-only is the default for sharing and printing. Cover should receive the information needed to teach, not an accidental pupil dossier with chairs attached.
The plan should learn without pretending to know
A useful history can show how the room and plan developed, which constraints were unresolved and what was deliberately altered. It should support reflection, not teacher surveillance with a nicer colour palette.
A seating plan is a practical hypothesis about how this class might work in this room today. SitRep gives that hypothesis a visible structure, a reason and a revision history.