The government is looking to expand its free teacher jobs board to include other school staff, including business leaders and catering personnel.
The service, launched in 2019, allows schools to advertise teaching, leadership and classroom support staff vacancies online free, in a bid to save leaders some of the estimated £75 million spent each year on recruitment.
After initial slow take-up and moves to better promote the service to schools, a Department for Education official today claimed the service was now a “credible alternative to national paid job boards”.
Will Bourke, a stakeholder and engagement lead at the DfE, said 83 per cent of state schools were now signed up to the service, which was now the “largest source of primary school jobs” directly listed in England, and the second-largest for secondary.
Visits to the site peaked at 350,000 in May this year, with almost 50,000 jobseekers signed up for alerts, Bourke said.
But the DfE is eyeing further expansion, after feedback showed schools wanted to know why other roles, such as business managers or catering staff, could not be advertised on the site.
“We’ve fed that back to the team. And at the moment our policy team are looking at widening our function,” Bourke said.
He said he hoped all roles could be advertised on the site within a year, making it “a one-stop place for school recruitment”.
Do people looking for catering jobs look at school jobs sites, or sites with catering jobs in all industries? Once again schools seem to be working on the assumption that as soon as they advertise a jobs they will be overwhelmed by applications and so all that matters is cost.
In reality there are very few teachers in many subjects and regions and schools need to be making the case for their school across the channels that will work best. And to stop patronising teachers with language that implies most of them aren’t good enough (‘we want an outstanding teacher’ etc).
DFE advertises about how much difference a person can make to young people, but thousands of teachers and ex teachers are telling people every day, not to do it, due to the way they are treated in order of the worst to last. The DFE, OFSTED, SLT (some), newspapers (right wing), feral students, parents(some).
Pay & pensions much worse off than 10 years ago, workload up, behaviour down, pressure up, expectations up, resources down, in short it a toxic environment for many teachers and any new recruits.