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comment on a live document (e.g. a lesson plan or learning resource) as it is being developed can add an extra dimension to intra-staff relationships and empower staff to share their ideas more regularly and with greater confidence.
Finding, attracting and retaining
the right staff
With an innovative model on hand to help give schools practical guidance, it is more than possible to recruit staff without incurring overwhelming bureaucracy, administrative processes or excess costs. This year, Teacher Booker developed a Total Workforce Management approach (TWM) to enable an enhanced, consistent quality of staff provision – as well as happy, motivated teams.
By integrating TWM into existing provisions – avoiding the need for schools to outsource their recruitment to other parties – key leaders can retain a better handle on:
• The costs of bundles and partnerships with third party recruitment service providers
• The amount of admin overhead incurred in workforce management, such as that involving payroll and reporting
• The integrity of data around candidates, compliance and invoices
The overall candidate experience.
As an example, SEN roles tend to have complex and often unique requirements, particularly if the care required is specific to a particular pupil or cohort. By adopting a TWM approach and sourcing, engaging, and evaluating candidates in-house, hiring schools can perhaps establish a better match between candidate and pupil/job role than a third party recruiter. Third parties often have a different balance of incentives to hiring schools - a placement generates revenue for a recruiter, and so this will play a part in the speed and execution of the introduction to a candidate, whereas for a school there is no real financial incentive to make a speedy hire. Making better
matches should enable better retention of staff, as we can hypothesise that job satisfaction will be higher due to a closer alignment of expectations.
Considering in-house management for your school
Bringing workforce-focused models back in house can entail additional liabilities – such as new accountability for worker quality, and the responsibility of fulfilling urgent requisitions at short notice. But just as the school environment is now shifting to more flexible ways of working, the process of workload management can integrate flexibility too.
We consider there to be four key parts of the contingent worker management process:
• Marketing and talent attraction
• Vetting and onboarding
• Resourcing and deployment
• Payroll and employment.
When outsourcing parts of the process, schools can play to their existing strengths. For example, they might manage their own talent attraction for long-term and permanent roles, but outsource day-to-day supply cover bookings where there is an urgent need to fill the vacancy. Another example might be to outsource the payroll and employment function to a third party, as this can maintain the flexibility of having workers off-payroll (which can confer benefits for both school and candidate), without impacting significantly on employer brand or candidate experience.
Where to go from here
With the financial, resource, physical and emotional strain of the past 18 months on schools, you would be forgiven for thinking that this is just another thing to add to your (already too long) to do list, or considering a strategic recruitment strategy as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a necessity. In reality however, we’ve already had to adopt a raft of new technological solutions and ways of working to ensure continued provision for pupils, so there is no reason why education recruitment should not also benefit from this same change in perspective.
And, what we are talking about is not a radical shift in approach. Recruitment agencies, third-party sites, vendors and staff banks will - and rightly should - play their part in education recruitment strategies for years to come, but the specific role they play should be determined by you and support your preferred recruitment approach and spend.
By implementing these small changes, we believe that you can not only reduce recruitment and retention costs but also the administrative burden and often high levels of stress involved in the process. As a result, more time and money can be spent on what really matters - delivering consistent and high- quality education for your pupils, not just today, but long into the future.
■ Recruiting staff.
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