In this Data Insights series we’re diving deep into data from over 100,000 supply jobs booked through our platform to reveal data-driven best practices, trends, and insights that empower you to provide and run a first-rate supply service to support your schools. Stay tuned for actionable analyses and strategies drawn from real-world booking data and set your organisation up for success on supply.

The most common worry we’ve heard from staffing suppliers (both supply agencies and MAT/LA supply pool operators) is about finding enough candidates to meet ongoing demand from schools. There’s a perception that the job is all about constantly sourcing new candidates – and lots of them.

So we wanted to find out – is it possible to accurately calculate how many supply staff you ACTUALLY need to support a school, long-term? If so, how many supply staff would you need to support 10 schools, or 50, or 100? We’ve crunched the numbers and the answer may surprise you.

The Scottish Local Authority Supply Pool model captures 100% of its schools’ supply needs. Scottish schools ONLY source supply from ONE single source – their Local Authority.

Teacher Booker is pleased to support many of those LAs in their supply management with our market leading Supply Pools platform. Analysing the data from this ‘closed’ model gives us a unique opportunity to answer some of these key questions about resourcing, volume and scale.

We’ve crunched the numbers from over 4 years of supply bookings across 9 Scottish Local Authorities. Those LAs range in size from 50 to over 200 schools and have anywhere from 400 to over 1500 supply staff.

What’s incredible is that across all settings, no matter the size of the supply pool, the number of schools, or whether the LA is predominantly urban or rural, there is one clear pattern:

Just 27% of the supply staff complete 75% of the supply work.

What this tells us is that the number of supply staff needed to support even large groups of schools is much lower than you might think.

For anyone supplying staff to schools — for example agency consultants, or the talent management departments of MATs that run a supply pool — the key point is to identify and nurture a core group of supply staff. To find that 25% of candidates who will be there day in, day out.

Schools feel pain when they’re unable to fill last minute bookings. But the majority of schools’ supply needs CAN be handled by a small group of dedicated supply staff.

This makes sense given our other recent findings, for example that almost 90% of single day supply bookings are not ‘same-day’ and are actually made in advance (and many booking requests on the Teacher Booker platform are sent directly to already-known, trusted supply staff).

Digging further into the numbers we found that, on average, a school group (of any size) needs 1.7 supply staff per school to cover 75% of their temporary staffing needs. What’s more, the average supply worker works 2 ½ days per week.

The average sized Multi-Academy Trust in England has 12 schools. That means the average sized MAT needs just 20 committed supply staff, working an average of 2.5 days a week to cover the majority of their temporary staffing needs. A 30 school MAT needs 50. Of course, some schools will need more support than others but that’s where the ability to work collaboratively starts to shine.

As a MAT Talent Acquisition or HR professional, consider the trainees, part-time employees, retirees, or talent pool job applicants in your Applicant Tracking System’s CRM – and your fresh new talent acquisition activities for supply staff specifically.

Pooling resources and actively engaging and deploying the staff who are already part of your organisation is the key to finding that 25%.

Our ongoing Data Insights series will continue to offer valuable perspectives and practical guidance to help schools master absence management. Keep an eye on our blog to stay informed!