Every year, over £0.5bn is spent on recruitment agency fees in public sector schools alone. That’s a staggering £30,000 per school! Whether it’s agency fees for temporary staff or permanent staff (including temporary to permanent fees), online job advertising or other indirect recruitment costs like admin and consultancy fees, this much-needed money is being diverted [...]
Our recent exposé on agency fees charged to schools generated much heated debate from schools, agencies and teachers. Now it's the teachers' turn. Here we’ll shine a light on the other side of the coin -- agency supply teacher pay, and the often indecipherable fees, deductions and accruals that appear each week on the payslips of agency [...]
The Retention Crisis is seldom spoken about, especially compared to its more prominent twin, The Recruitment Crisis. Nonetheless, the figures associated with Retention Crisis are deeply unsettling. Eager to understand the story behind these figures and the optimal response strategies, we were fortunate enough to attend an eclectic smattering of talks on the subject at the [...]
Introduction The DfE’s long-awaited ‘Recruitment and Retention Strategy’ was released today and, as you might expect, there is plenty to discuss and dissect. Broadly, we echo the enthusiasm of other pundits and industry leaders. The Recruitment and Retention Strategy (RRS) is bold, well-informed and could rewrite the fundamentals of how the teaching workforce is organised. [...]
The Challenge Many schools use agency staff on a long-term basis. In fact, some agency staff can work in schools for years and still be 'on the agency's books'. This incurs a massive accumulation of cost that's crippling school budgets and hurting teachers – but it's been the price of having off-payroll staff for [...]
The past year has been filled with several calls for schools to offer more opportunities for part-time and flexible work to teachers. The reasons are straightforward: Teaching is gripped by a recruitment and retention crisis, both at the national and local scale. More teachers are leaving the classroom – and often the education sector entirely – than [...]
"At a time when our schools have to ask parents to give extra money for books and classroom essentials, it’s crazy we’re spending half a billion pounds a year just on agency fees. That money should be spent on teachers and the badly needed resources our children need to get a world class education" [...]
Introduction Outrage at public sector cuts is now so routine, that it’s hard to feel any authentic anger towards the government. But ire, in this instance, is appropriate. With school funding set to remain flat for the next two years despite inflation, schools are fated to have to make their own cuts – most worryingly, [...]
There’s a familiar battery of daft arguments that plague debates about teacher stress. It seems absurd to give them any airtime, but having just surveyed the comments sections of recent articles on the stress epidemic I can see that they’re still in wide circulation. And, of course, even some prominent public figures still openly extoll [...]
With both pupil numbers and demand for teachers set to rise in the near future, it will become increasingly important for school leaders not just to recruit, but to retain good staff. New models for better retention are required. The number of teachers joining the profession has roughly counterbalanced the number leaving it in recent [...]
