Planning PGL and residential trip rooms without the friendship fallout

Rooming lists for a residential — a PGL week, an outdoor-centre trip, a field-study stay — are quietly one of the most stressful jobs of the year. Every room has a fixed number of beds, dorms are normally single-sex, every child desperately wants to be with their friends, and the children with medical needs should not all end up in one room. The Trip Mixer's residential mode does the fiddly part for you and shows you exactly who still needs a check.

How it works

Switch the Trip Mixer to 'Residential rooms', set how many beds each room has, and give each child a gender and a friend request or two. The planner splits the class into the right number of single-sex rooms for that bed count, then uses the same balancing engine as the Class Mixer to seat children with a requested friend while spreading the medical flags across rooms rather than clustering them. Children with an unspecified gender are kept in their own set of rooms so nobody is forced into a boys' or girls' dorm by accident.

Why single-sex by default

Residential dorms are single-sex as a matter of routine safeguarding practice, so that is the default here. For younger year groups or settings where mixed rooms are appropriate and agreed, a single toggle switches to mixed allocation and the same friend-matching applies.

Friend requests, handled fairly

Each child can name a couple of friends. The planner tries to give everyone at least one of their requests within their room's capacity, and it cannot honour every list in full — so it marks each child as roomed with a friend or not, and tells you how many children got a friend overall. That means you can scan for the handful who didn't and have a quiet word, rather than discovering it on the coach.

How to use it well

• Set the bed count to match the actual rooms at the centre before allocating.
• Ask children for two or three friend names, not a long list — a couple the planner can satisfy beats ten it can't.
• Check the medical callouts on each room and confirm the spread suits your supervision plan.
• Re-run to get a different valid arrangement, then print the room cards as a ready-made list for the centre and for night-time supervision.

Where your data lives

Everything you type stays in your browser. There is no account and no server-side database — class lists and saved work live in your browser's own storage on the device you are using. You can export a backup or clear everything at any time from the Classes page.