Student placement software designed to help Elementary and Primary schools with the difficult and time consuming task of creating classes where all students have at least one friend, while managing a balanced mix of different student ability levels and classroom dynamics. Teachers are able to keep students together or apart, maintain class gender ratios, monitor class average ability levels, place students with individual teachers and manually edit the classes created by Class Maker with real-time feedback of any modifications made. It can also be used to create school camp accommodation and activity groups. Class Maker is an innovative software solution, developed to streamline this process and provide a number of balanced grade alternatives for teachers to choose from. Class groups can be sorted according to the following criteria. • Friend Requests Students have the opportunity to nominate up to 5 friends who they would like to be with the following year. Class Maker uses advanced matching algorithms to satisfy these requests. The program also offers the option to relax these requirements by allowing some friend requests to remain unfulfilled. • Student Separation Class Maker provides teachers the ability to separate students, even if the student has requested a particular friend. The teacher’s condition overrides the student’s request. • Essential Student Grouping There are times when students need to be kept together. Class Maker allows teachers to fix any number of student pairs or multiple groups of students into the same class. • Multi-age (composite) classes Class Maker provides the teacher the ability to create multi-age classes with 2 or 3 different year levels, and to control the numbers of each year level in the created classes. • Balance Student Ability Levels Teachers can add up to four ability categories for each each student, grading each student on a five point scale (eg. A - E). Default descriptors are Literacy, Numeracy, Behaviour and Participation, however these can be changed to suit the school requirements. Students can also be identified as belonging to 2 special groups, such as ESL/EAL or Accelerated, and Class Maker will monitor these ability levels and groups to enable teachers to make more balanced class lists. • Manual Class Size By default, Class Maker creates grades of equal or near-equal size. However, it also offers the ability to create classes of any size to suit the requirements of the school. • Gender Ratio It can be important to maintain a mix of male and female students in a particular grade. Class Maker provides the teacher the ability to produce class sets with any gender ratio required. • Teacher choice A student may need to be placed in a particular teacher’s class, or alternatively there may be a request to not be placed with that teacher. Class Maker offers this choice as an option. • File Compatibility Class Maker provides an easy to use Microsoft Excel template for student data input, which includes internal checking to ensure correct spelling of students' names. Class Maker outputs the sorted class data in Excel compatible format for easy viewing, manipulation and printing.