5 Real-World Reasons Why Your School Needs a Permanent Workforce Strategy

Since the novel coronavirus reared its tiny, ugly head almost 2 years ago, no school, teacher or pupil in the UK has been spared a barrage of disruption. The effects of the pandemic on education have been, by turns, profound and perplexing, not least for schools’ staffing arrangements. 

While the pandemic period has seen teacher training meet government targets for the first time in 8 years, the crisis has reduced schools’ capacity to provide placements for new trainees. The experience of Covid-19 has distorted the educational job market across the board, unbalancing some previously stable trends while only exacerbating others.

This level of flux can be hard to keep up with. That’s why schools need a joined-up, strategic approach to their recruitment that can weather the (all-too predictable) unpredictability of the coming years. Your ideal workforce strategy will cover contingencies, attract and nurture the best candidates for your permanent roles and make sure your current staff are happy in their roles. 

This kind of holistic blueprint might sound like a new hurdle that already at-capacity senior leaders just don’t have time to jump. But given the raw facts about the current educational labour market, a cohesive recruitment strategy has never been more important. Here’s why: 

For all its chaos, the pandemic has not altered the prevailing narrative of the last decade in educational recruitment. Over the last decade, the total number of teachers has failed to increase at the same rate as the number of pupils. When figures were last published in 2019, the ratio of pupils to qualified teachers in England stood at 19:1. 

While the recent influx in new teacher trainees is welcome news, these numbers have not been able to buck this ongoing trend. In addition, schools in disadvantaged areas finding it increasingly difficult, compared to those in affluent areas, to fill vacancies with permanent staff. As a result, teachers - and core subject specialists in particular - are highly sought-after by inner-city schools. 

In this seller’s market, schools need to ensure that they are making enough of an effort to build relationships with potential members of staff, even when they don’t have a role to fill for them just yet. 

Our recruitment consultants manage prospective candidates for our partner schools digitally in ‘talent pools’, allowing schools to keep their favourite candidates engaged with the school until they have a vacancy ready for them. 

In September 2020, the National Foundation for Educational Research identified a 35% year-on-year increase in postgraduate teacher training applications over the course of the year. Attracted by promised pay rises and the job security of the education sector in a suddenly precarious economy, young graduates have been galvanised by the pandemic to flock to the teaching profession. 

There are initial signs that this remarkable upswing may now have run out of steam. Nonetheless, this big infusion of new blood presents a new set of ongoing opportunities for school recruitment. With tomorrow’s top teachers currently honing their skills in such numbers, schools need to be particularly future-facing. 

Teaching Personnel’s ECT Pool gives schools easy access to hundreds of the best newly qualified teachers, all of whom have access to the highest-quality training materials. Our Future Teachers programme offers schools the chance to mold their own future faculties by putting eager recent graduates with an interest in education to work in learning support placements. These schemes help school leaders take advantage of fresh talent and lay out a reliable recruitment pipeline that stretches well into the future. 

This means that schools’ websites need to be properly set up for effective recruitment, with a dedicated page listing all vacancies and clearly signposting how to start the application process. Given that over 90% of jobhunters use their smartphones to search for positions, it’s critical that you implement a responsive design for your site that is fully optimised for mobile devices. 

To have a fighting chance of securing the best people for the job, schools need to reach as many top candidates as possible through the right digital channels. This is all about creating meaningful points of engagement, or touchpoints, with candidates. 

These might involve a candidate liking a school’s social media post, clicking through to their website from their Google results or watching a promotional YouTube video. Not all touchpoints are created equal in terms of their impact, but taken together, they can define whether a candidate will choose to go ahead with an application. 

To stay relevant to the new generation of educators, these touch points must be in place and always on the whole year round. 

Senior leaders might find it a strange experience to think about the connotations of their school’s ‘brand’. After all, aren’t schools meant to be places of learning, sheltered from the pressures of the market economy? 

Yet when you are competing for in-demand candidates who have multiple options on their plate, their perception of your school and what it stands for really matters. This requires schools to think about the qualities and attributes they wish to convey to prospective teachers, and how they will do so through their communication channels. 

Colour scheme, logo, tone of voice, use of imagery, website design and printed materials all play a part in cementing your brand. Social proof – the role of imitation and positive reinforcement from peers in influencing individuals’ decisions – is another core facet of brand value. Schools must ensure that they solicit testimonials and positive feedback from current staff to display on their marketing assets. 

The biggest multi-academy trusts have developed sophisticated brand identities that they leverage to attract the best candidates. While individual schools may struggle to match MATs’ capacity to recruit at universities or hold their own career fairs, they can achieve the same impact with a highly visible, well-conceived candidate-facing brand. Our digital marketing experts at Teaching Personnel are on hand to help schools firmly embed their brands in the local job market. 

It isn’t just the number of new recruits to the teaching profession that has been rising. In 2020, the overall number of teachers leaving the profession fell by 17% year-on-year. This swiftly turned around a 10-year trend of creeping retention issues in the education sector. 

Yet senior leaders should not place too much stock in this trend continuing unabated. Teaching’s reputation as a ‘recession-proof’ career path commonly sees retention rates rise in times of economic hardship, before falling back again as the economy improves. 

As the UK’s economic recovery hopefully continues into 2022, schools must be alert to the strong possibility that this moment of rock-solid retention may soon pass and go into reverse. Senior leaders must ensure that the internal culture at their school is not alienating current members of staff, and that those who might have doubts about their place in the profession are given ample encouragement. 

As we home in on the end of 2021, educational recruitment is still in a transitional phase post-Covid. The pandemic has thrown previously stable patterns on their heads, bolstering teacher retention and driving more new blood into the sector. Yet these welcome reinforcements have not been enough to close the deficit of supply and demand. 

These new trends are, however, unlikely to be permanent. This level of uncertainty requires schools to stay flexible and to pay special attention to their brand value. 

Teaching Personnel offers an integrated, full-service Permanent Workforce Resourcing package. This product solves for every aspect of a school’s recruitment needs, from brand identity to advertising vacancies to vetting candidates. 

Whether you are looking for short-term supply or your next permanent member of staff, our recruitment consultants will manage the entire process for you. The only thing you have to do is get in touch.