Opening hours and calendars

Reducing out-of-hours energy use is one of the best ways to cut costs and carbon. To help you with this, Energy Sparks uses a school’s opening times to calculate the energy used during and outside of normal school hours. 

It is therefore important that you update your school’s opening hours on Energy Sparks so that these give a true reflection of a normal day at your school. This will allow us to highlight where energy use out of hours is costing you money.

Updating your school’s opening times needs to be done by a school admin user. 

The Edit school times page is accessible from the Manage school menu when signed in as a school or group admin.

Visit the edit school times page for your school.

Under School opening hours you can make amendments to the default opening times (08:50-15:20) using a 24 hour format. When complete, click Save school times.

Please note that although we will immediately save any changes you make to your school opening hours, any of our energy analysis that relies on these time periods will only update overnight. Changes to opening hours are applied to all your available data retrospectively and going forward.

Enter the times when the majority of your pupils are arriving and leaving your school. This should be when the school is fully operational. Before and after school clubs can be included if the majority of the school is in use by pupils. 

External lettings or times when you have only a small proportion of your school estate in use by pupils should be listed under community use times (see next section).

Many schools will have cleaning or other premises staff in the school outside of the times when they are open to pupils. Do not include these periods in your main school opening hours as we recommend that you should keep energy use to a minimum during these times.

If you have lettings or community use of your school premises, school admin users can add these to Energy Sparks so that we can highlight energy consumption by external users of your school. You can also use this section to record the times when you have before and after school clubs running that only use a small proportion of your school estate.

The Edit school times page is accessible from the Manage school menu when signed in as a school or group admin.

Visit the edit school times page for your school.

Under Community use times you can click Add time and enter the Day, Opening time, Closing time and Time of year using a 24 hour format. When complete, click Save community use times.

Please note that although we will immediately save any changes you make to your community use times, any of our energy analysis that relies on these time periods will only update overnight. Changes to opening hours are applied to all your available data retrospectively and going forward.

Energy Sparks uses publicly available information about term dates in your area during account set up, or the term dates provided by your Local Authority or Multi-Academy Trust, if your school has been set up as part of a group. We encourage you to add any inset days or other variations from the standard calendar to improve our analysis of your school’s energy usage.

Your School calendar page is accessible from the Manage school menu when signed in as a school or group admin user.

Visit the School calendar page for your school.

To add an inset day, click Add new event and then:

Once saved, the inset day should be highlighted in your calendar in either red (for an in school inset day) or purple (for an out of school inset day).

Alternatively, you can view, edit and delete your calendar events in a list view.

On the main school calendar page, click the Current events tab, and view your school calendar holidays, terms and inset days.

You can Edit or Delete events by clicking on the Action buttons on the right hand side of each event.