Built around the rule you actually care about
Every teacher has a short mental list of pairs who cannot sit together. That list is the real constraint on a classroom seating plan, and it is the thing most free chart tools ignore entirely — they will happily draw you a lovely grid and then let you put the two loudest students side by side.
Here you add those pairs first. Auto-arrange treats them as hard rules and seats the most constrained students first, so the difficult combinations get resolved while there are still free desks to work with. If you move someone by hand into a group that breaks a rule, that group turns red and names the pair, so a mistake is visible immediately rather than on Monday morning.
Setting up your room
- Desk groups is the number of clusters or table groups in your room. For rows, treat each row as a group and set the seats to the row length.
- Seats each is how many students fit in one group. Four is the common default for cluster seating; pairs work well when you want less cross-talk.
- Print the chart and keep a copy on your desk. It is far more useful to a cover teacher than a plan that only exists on your laptop.
How often to change the plan
A seating plan is not meant to last the year. Most teachers rearrange each term, after an assessment, or whenever a group stops working. The reason plans get left in place too long is usually that redoing them is tedious — which is exactly the part this tool removes. Your class list stays saved in the browser, so a rearrangement is one click of auto-arrange plus a couple of manual tweaks. If you want a genuinely fresh mix, use the random seating chart generator, which shuffles the whole class while still respecting your keep-apart rules.
Accessibility and practical needs come first
Before you optimise anything else, place the students who need a specific position: a student who needs to be near the front to see or hear, a student who needs an aisle for mobility, a student who works better close to your desk. Seat those students manually, then run auto-arrange for the rest — it fills the remaining seats and leaves the ones you already assigned alone. Getting those placements right matters more than any balance the tool can calculate.
Nothing about your students leaves your device
Student names are sensitive data, and schools rightly ask questions about where they go. This tool does not upload anything. Your class list is held in your own browser's local storage and never sent to a server, so there is no account to create, no third-party copy of your class list, and nothing for a data protection form to worry about. The trade-off is that the plan lives on the device you made it on, so print or save a PDF if you need it elsewhere.