teacher recruitment | Schools Week

School’s success not possible without young staff, says head

Having “very young members of staff” who are prepared to implement a new system of behaviour management has been crucial to a new school’s success. Peter Lee (pictured), the head at Q3 Academy Langley, an academy outside Birmingham, said his young staff were willing to employ methods drawn from other academies and free schools, which […]

NAHT: Senior leader recruitment getting even worse

Schools are increasingly struggling to recruit senior leaders, with the proportion of heads failing to hire a new assistant head or principal almost double what it was last year. The NAHT union’s annual recruitment survey has found that 19 per cent of leaders failed to fill one of these vacancies this year, up from 10 […]

Why we need more men to become primary teachers

On International Men’s Day, Ryan Stevens argues that we should be doing more to recruit more men into primary teaching As a 24-year-old Primary NQT, there is one thing that separates me from the vast majority of my colleagues: I’m a man. As of the last academic year, 85% of teachers working in primary and […]

Government investigates recruitment agency cold calls to teachers

Teachers are being targeted by “unprofessional” cold calls from recruitment agencies during school hours – and the government has vowed to investigate some of the firms responsible. The schools minister Nick Gibb said his department will “explore” the concerns raised by schools about the behaviour of some agencies, after a Conservative MP raised the issue […]

Academisation makes it harder for local schools to work together

Changes to governance and organisation structures are starting to make it more challenging for schools to work collaboratively, says Anna Hennell James. In Ipswich, where I work, we have a cluster of local schools made up of two high schools and seven feeder primaries. Schools in the area have historically worked around school-based “pyramids”, which […]

MATs dodge recruitment challenges by parachuting teachers into needy schools

Multi-academy trusts are dodging the recruitment crisis by parachuting teachers into schools that would normally struggle to hire, a new study has found. The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) has today published its latest multi-academy trust (MAT) teacher retention research. The study, based on School Workforce Census data from 2010-15, found that movement of […]

Teachers leaving faster than ever – and 10 other school workforce findings

The Department for Education has published the 2016 School Workforce Census figures this morning. Schools Week has the key findings: 1. Lowest teacher entry rate in five years The rate of qualified teachers entering the profession is at its lowest since 2011 (read more on that here). In 2016, 10.1 per cent of […]

New redundancy tactics for schools faced with tough decisions

Staff are going through interviews and graded assessments to decide who to make redundant, Schools Week has learnt. James Lynas, a partner at law firm Winckworth Sherwood, said a handful of schools are taking the new redundancy route to ensure that they keep the best-performing teachers. Teaching unions, however, say schools could be using the […]

Teacher recruitment and retention is all about talent management

Teacher recruitment and retention is not a government problem – it’s schools that need to embrace new technologies and adopt a servant-manager mentality, says David Cobb The debates rage on about grammar schools, free schools and funding, but without dealing with teacher recruitment and retention, those policy debates are largely irrelevant. These are the facts: […]