Outdated Recruitment Practice has no Place in Education
Current ways of addressing the recruitment crisis are short-term at best. We need to go in a new direction, says Kevin Green…
- by Kevin Green
Have we reached the ultimate tipping point in education? The point where the combination of rising pupil populations and falling numbers of teachers coming into the profession will mean some seismic shifts in the way we recruit teachers?
Whilst the growth of multi-academy trusts is helping with the additional school places issues, teachers are increasingly leaving our schools and the pipeline of fresh talent is failing short of demand.
But could the continued growth of MATs also help to accelerate a major overhaul of the way teachers are recruited into schools and solve some of the challenges this sector is facing?
Examining the issues
One of the key pressure points is that recruitment methods in this sector continue to be too transactional.
Typically, a MAT (and its academies at a local level) will work with a number of different agencies, whose role is to simply match qualified people with the increasing number of vacancies for a percentage of the candidate’s salary or a day rate.
This approach is effective on paper, but is expensive and often just focused on addressing short-term needs.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the supply of cover teachers, where a revolving door of teachers can be supplied to the same school or group of schools by a myriad of different supply agencies.
From my experience in other sectors, this approach does not always lead to long-term positive outcomes for the users of the service, who may find that their workforce is comprised of a disproportionately large percentage of temporary teachers and support staff.
If 76% of headteachers and MAT decision makers indicate that finding quality teaching staff is the hardest and most stressful part of their job, schools should be asking the recruitment sector to adopt the more innovative practices used widely in other industries.
In these sectors a longer-term approach to finding staff is used but it is often reliant on more genuine partnership working between the agency and the employer.
New direction
Imagine a world where a MAT leader has easy access to a pool of high-quality cover staff that can be called on to fill vacancies in any academy across the group, at any given moment.
A world where supply teachers hit the ground running – arriving on day one with a ‘toolkit’ containing the trust’s schemes of work, lesson plans and other resources they could tap into immediately, and bringing with them the best practice experience they need to really make a difference.
The trust would gain a working, evolving collection of staff who would not just ‘fill they gap’ they would also understand the academies’ ethos and ways of working.
In this scenario, continuity of teaching becomes a given as supply teachers are ‘ring-fenced’ for the trust and for individual schools within it. MAT leaders would get a consistent supply of teachers with the talent and skills needed to raise standards for pupils, and teachers would have the flexibility to work how and where they choose.
Taking this approach would open up the opportunity for substantial savings to be made through economies of scale in providing staff to all schools within an academy group – money that could be redirected back into the classroom.
Easing the burden
While this is a fresh approach to tackling the skills shortage in education, this model of managed service recruitment is highly successful in the financial industry. It could provide a great opportunity to revolutionise recruitment in education.
Importantly, it would mark a departure by putting the onus very much on agencies to step up to the plate and work in partnership with schools and trusts to meet the demands of the evolving recruitment landscape in education.
With a guaranteed supply chain of quality teachers, schools will be in a much stronger position to inspire and support their pupils to achieve all they are capable of. This opportunity to innovate might be borne out of necessity, but it is no less exciting or welcome for that.
The full report Resourcing the Performance Agenda in Schools and Multi-Academy Trusts can be seen here.
Kevin Green is the former chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and a non-executive director at specialist recruiters Affinity Workforce, and is looking at new ways of working to address the skills shortage in education.
