How this calculator works

A caseload number counts students. It does not count the work those students' plans generate, and that work varies enormously between two people holding the same number.

One caseload of eighteen might involve a handful of annual reviews and few outside providers. Another eighteen might carry fifteen annual IEPs, six reevaluations, four behaviour plans, and five adults per student who all need to be kept informed. The same count describes two completely different jobs.

So the number on a spreadsheet cannot settle a workload question, in either direction. It is a starting fact, not a conclusion.

Rather than assign weight to labels — a category, a service minute total, a placement — the calculator asks what you actually have to do: IEPs to write, meetings to attend, reevaluations to coordinate, students to monitor, plans to keep running, providers to talk to, families to keep informed, systems to enter the same fact into, and unplanned situations to hold.

Each of those is a task with a duration. Adding the durations produces an estimate of demand, and demand is what a schedule has to accommodate. This also keeps disability information out of the calculator entirely, which is deliberate.

Some work happens once a year per student — an annual IEP, a three-year reevaluation. That work is real but lumpy, and comparing it with a weekly block of protected time needs a common unit.

The calculator spreads annual quantities across the instructional year: total minutes for the year, divided by the number of instructional weeks in the published assumptions. Monthly quantities, such as meetings, are converted using an average number of weeks per month.

This is an averaging step, and averages hide peaks. A February with nine annual reviews is not an average week. The weekly figure describes the year's load as a rate, not the worst week you will have.

The same task takes different amounts of time in different weeks, in different systems, and with different colleagues. A single number would imply a precision nobody has.

So every assumption carries a low, a midpoint, and a high figure, and the result carries them through: a low estimate where things go smoothly, a high estimate where they do not, and a midpoint used for comparisons. A wide band is honest rather than vague.

Protected case-management time is time that is scheduled and defended for this work — not preparation shared with instruction, not a lunch period, and not the hours you find after everyone has gone home.

The calculator uses only what you report as genuinely protected, because that is the figure a schedule can be held to. Work done in unprotected time is still work; it simply does not have a place in the schedule, which is exactly what the gap describes.

Weekly time gap = estimated hours required − protected hours reported. It is calculated separately for the low, midpoint, and high estimates. A positive gap is a shortfall; a negative one means the protected time exceeds the estimate and is shown as available capacity.

Annualised gap = weekly gap × the working weeks in the published assumptions. It exists because a modest weekly number becomes a very concrete annual one, which is usually the figure a scheduling conversation needs.

Workload-to-capacity ratio = midpoint estimated hours ÷ protected hours. At or below 1× the protected time covers the estimate. Above that and up to the published pressure threshold, the schedule is under pressure. Above the pressure threshold, the difference has to come from somewhere else every week, which the calculator calls a persistent time deficit.

These readings describe a schedule. They are never a score, a grade, a compliance judgment, or a statement about the person doing the work.

If you report no protected case-management time, the ratio is shown as unavailable, with the reason stated. It is not shown as zero, as infinite, or as an error, and nothing is divided by zero.

The weekly and annual gaps are still shown, because they are still meaningful: with no protected time, the whole estimate is the gap. That is a structural finding about the schedule, and it is worth stating plainly rather than hiding behind an unavailable number.

It cannot tell you:

• whether a caseload is lawful, compliant, or contractually correct
• how well anyone is doing their job, or how fast they work
• how many staff a school or district needs
• what any individual student requires, which no calculator should attempt
• what your worst week looks like, since it works with averages
• anything it was not told — work you did not report is not in the estimate

It is a way to make invisible work countable, so a conversation can start from the same figures.

Every assumption lives in a named, dated set — the one in use is shown in the table below and stamped on every result. Changing a number means publishing a new set with a new version and effective date; the old set is kept so an earlier estimate can always be reproduced.

Changes are recorded with who made them, when, and why. Only authorised EduNexus administrators can publish an assumption set. Feedback from the form at the bottom of this page is read as part of each review.

You know this work better than a published table does. Pick the one that felt furthest from your experience — that is the most useful thing you can send us.