Are you finding it difficult to recruit staff? If so, are there particular roles or subjects that you are struggling to recruit for? Here, ASCL members have their say.

Just the job?

Plugging the gaps 

The state of teacher recruitment is widely acknowledged and with the DfE’s Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy (2019) still to bear fruit, leaders across the country work tirelessly to plug the gaps as the demographic bulge moves into secondary schools. 

Great leaders know that the key ingredients to successful organisations are ‘the right people’ – an organisation is nothing but its employees. But with hundreds of ‘teacher of (insert subject here)’ vacancies, should we review person specifications and criteria to ensure we recruit ‘the right people’? 

Post-pandemic education looks different; we all became temporary ‘teachers of online learning’ much more than teachers of our subject specialisms, so has the time come to rethink and take a risk? Could your next advert simply be for ‘a teacher’ – to inspire a love of learning and support young people to build the resilience needed to respond to whatever their future may bring? Because at the end of the day, that is our true purpose as educators no matter what our subject specialism. 

Helen Wakefield
Deputy Headteacher, LiFE Multi-Academy Trust (MAT), Leicestershire 

Post-pandemic struggles 

As a MAT in Sheffield/ Derbyshire, we have been very lucky and not suffered recruitment issues in the past in any areas of teaching, education support or business administrative staff. However, post-pandemic we are struggling to recruit specialist business administrative roles and general administration roles in the central MAT team, the Teaching School Hub and schools. 

We know we are not alone in this; other local trusts are the same. We believe it is due to the tight labour market and the fact that we are less flexible than the private sector or other public sector departments around patterns of working hours and working from home. 

Employees in specialist areas like IT, finance, HR and administration can work in any sector and therefore we need to look at new ways of working to attract staff. This is something we are looking to review. Fortunately, at the moment we are still able to attract quality candidates for teaching and education support staff. 

Ann Allen
Chief Operating Officer, Chorus Education Trust, Sheffield 

Inflationary pressures 

Anyone recruit a cleaner lately? How about a dining supervisor? No, me neither. 

Which is hardly surprising because when it comes to positions like these, there is one labour market regardless of whether an employer is in the public or private sector and schools just can’t compete while private sector pay is rising so rapidly. Of course, schools can also raise their pay rates but without the funding to match it, they are stuck. In other words, the labour market for support staff is leaving them way behind. 

In the past, schools relied on an army of (mainly female) workers attracted by the family friendly hours, but that cuts no ice when inflation is running at 9.4% and energy bills have tripled. Migrant labour has dried up and now that there are more jobs than people, I bet some school leaders are having to hoover their own corridors. 

Schools must pay at the market rate but are not funded at the market rate, which means money that could be spent on teaching is diverted into pay, in this case support staff pay. As usual it’s young people who pay the price. 

Carl Smith
Principal, Casterton College, Rutland

Designed with IMPACT

© 2024 Association of School and College Leaders | Valid XHTML | Contact us