Every year, primary-school teachers face a demanding puzzle: how can pupils be divided among new classes in a way that respects friendships and other preferences, while also creating balanced groups and meeting teachers' practical constraints?
For Anouk Berkhout (see photo), a primary-school teacher in the Alkmaar region, this was a familiar annual task. Her experience prompted her husband, applied mathematician Joost Berkhout, to explore whether mathematics could help.
Together with master’s graduate Amber Stoevelaar, Berkhout developed an approach that turns class allocation into a mathematical optimization problem. Rather than making all choices by hand, schools can use an algorithm to identify class compositions that meet as many preferences and conditions as possible.
This approach has been used for three consecutive years at several primary schools in the Alkmaar region to help form their new classes. The algorithm proposes a set of classes, which teachers can review and use to refine the constraints or priorities. After several iterations, this results in a solution that is both practical for the school and mathematically well-founded.
More information on the research into allocating primary-school pupils to classes is available in Amber Stoevelaar’s master’s thesis.