Latest / HFL Education / The HFL Education Business Services Podcast - The recruitment and retention crisis; how can school leaders adapt? Part 1

Transcript

The HFL Education Business Services Podcast - The recruitment and retention crisis; how can school leaders adapt? Part 1 · HFL Education

• 0:00
  Becuase Hello and welcome to HFL Education Business Services podcast.
• 0:05
  I'm Catherine Loake, the director of business services here at HFL Education.
• 0:09
  We wanted to create this series of podcasts because we recognise that the role of school leadership grows ever wider, ever deeper.
• 0:14
  And finding the time to unpack some of those key issues away from frontline teaching and learning is growing ever more challenging.
• 0:20
  And that's where we come in.
• 0:21
  This week I'm joined by Alex Tomkins at Greenside School in Stevenage for a two parter.
• 0:26
  Part one we're going to be looking at recruitment and retention in schools at present.
• 0:31
  And part two we'll be looking at the future of recruitment and retention in education.
• 0:35
  So that generational shift we're currently experiencing with our Gen Z coming into the workforce and the future of classrooms, and how they might look 5 to 10 years from now.
• 0:45
  Hello Alex.
• 0:46
  Hello.
• 0:46
  Do you want to start by just telling us a little bit about your fantastic school?
• 0:50
  So Greenside schools in Stevenage, so not very far away from here.
• 0:53
  We educate around 200 young people, although that sounds quite small, we're quite a big operation, so most of our class sizes are about ten pupils, we are meant to be focused on being severe learning difficulties yet within our school we've got seven different pathways that young people can go on to.
• 1:09
  So they could have profound needs.
• 1:11
  They could be very complex autism.
• 1:13
  They could also be in that traditional SLD in the middle we have about 26 teachers with SLT on top and we employ about 150 staff.
• 1:21
  Staff particularly is a big part of my role as a head teacher.
• 1:25
  And I found that that was interesting with my own training as being a head I've been a head now at Greenside for three years, and I went up to Cambridgeshire and be a head within a trust for a couple of years, and I was deputy and all the other across 5 or 6 other special schools.
• 1:39
  So I found it's been very interesting to be a head teacher and find out the staff is actually probably taking up 80% of my job role, rather than you'd say, when you think about being a head, you think it's all about the kids and kids and kids, which obviously we all want it to be.
• 1:55
  Being able to support and make sure there's enough people to do the education in the school is a big challenge.
• 2:02
  So it sounds like we've got the perfect person to be talking recruitment and retention.
• 2:06
  I guess for me it's increasingly an umbrella term, particularly the retention piece.
• 2:11
  And within that there's a lot of things to unpack, not least staff burnout, which I think is becoming a bit of an occupational hazard in education and attendance.
• 2:20
  And I think I read last year the average number of sick days taken by a teacher was eight, which is a staggering statistic.
• 2:27
  I know you and I sat down a couple of months ago, and I was really inspired by the conversation we had about some of the innovative things you've done at Greenside around sort of retention and staff attendance and wellbeing.
• 2:38
  Do you want to tell me a little bit about that?
• 2:39
  Because I think people would really benefit from understanding some of those really inspiring things you've done.
• 2:44
  I try and take a different sort of focus on recruitment, retention and burnout.
• 2:49
  I think it's important to focus on them all a little bit separate in some respects.
• 2:54
  I think when it comes to retention there is a challenge around retaining the right people and making sure they grow with the organisation.
• 3:02
  So Greenside, for instance, when I joined it as a head teacher, was in a difficult place.
• 3:07
  We had a lot of agency in the building at the time.
• 3:10
  The budget wasn't particularly great because we had to spend so much on agency due to staff absence, and we were coming out the back of Covid.
• 3:17
  And I think during Covid in special schools, it was very much seen as we were just Butlins, really.
• 3:22
  We were just trying to keep the place fun and happy.
• 3:25
  But teaching, the learning was put to the side it was always a bit of a challenge to move quickly because I was a big fan of not being in a deficit budget they all come part in part to making sure the school was sustainable.
• 3:35
  And I'm a big fan of sustainable.
• 3:37
  I listened to the podcast couple of weeks ago and Carole's sort of podcast and talking about different leadership styles, actually, I never really heard of that architect sort of leader.
• 3:47
  And actually seeing it more of a three to five or even to ten year sort of approach, because I found out very quickly as a head teacher, there's not many hours in the day, there's definitely not many weeks in the year.
• 3:57
  And before you know it, 38 weeks of the year soon disappears, and you have to make sure what you plan to achieve is possible.
• 4:05
  The big strategic oversight with recruitment, retention and burnout is looking at things across the three year.
• 4:12
  So my school development plan, which you can kind of see on my website, I'm quite transparent has things about what the school will look like in a couple of years, and then threading it back through, because you really can't achieve very much in a very short amount of time.
• 4:26
  You have to break it down.
• 4:28
  And some respects, you get to the end of the year and you still go back and you flex and forward but you're working towards what I call a vision that is possible we actually this year decided to look at changing our vision and renewing it becuase we felt like particularly in Greenside, it was very much we just wanted kids to reach their potential.
• 4:47
  We just wanted them to achieve.
• 4:49
  And all schools have that vision.
• 4:50
  Is that really a vision?
• 4:52
  A vision needs to be something that you're going to try and reach towards over about five years.
• 4:55
  What is going to what's changing as the school that you want to see?
• 4:59
  And for Greenside, we felt that actually that vision needs to be around the staff because the staff are the people.
• 5:06
  Right now I'm sitting here, the staff are ensuring the kids are getting a quality offer.
• 5:10
  It's not me that's doing it.
• 5:11
  It's not the kids themselves, particularly in special.
• 5:14
  They need a lot of support.
• 5:16
  So we need to make sure the staff are the people leading it.
• 5:19
  So actually having your school development plan, where really most of it is focused on the staff to ensure that happens.
• 5:25
  And if you don't have the staff in the room, I think particularly in special, that's where a lot of the burnout comes from, it's been very challenging to actually ensure that staff are able to offload, but also to be able to, reflect and be able to look at what they're doing as well What are some of the sort of practical things you've done?
• 5:45
  School environments are tricky, aren't they?
• 5:46
  they can't be the most flexible of places as you said, your staff are in there now delivering education.
• 5:51
  They can't be working from home.
• 5:52
  Are there any sort of practical things you've managed to do that have really supported retention and reducing burnout and staff attendance?
• 5:58
  Listening is quite important because I think SLT can feel quite removed at times, the head teachers role has become more and more laptop based it can feel very much because of the business side of schools you're removed.
• 6:10
  So we found, when I first started at Greenside, a process of listening, because you need to form those relationships.
• 6:17
  And the relationships with different staff are different depending on who they are.
• 6:21
  If they're self-motivated, then you leave them to it and you just make sure you check in.
• 6:26
  And then for other staff that actually want a bit of support, we've actually invested in a lot of our strategy around coaching.
• 6:34
  So we used to do a lot of mentoring, but it was felt that actually most of the time the staff have the knowledge, you know, and I think this is across all settings, not just specialists, but we really pride ourselves on each child being unique.
• 6:49
  And actually you're only going to know that child if you spend time with them.
• 6:52
  And the only people spending lots of time with them are the TA’s in the classroom and the teachers.
• 6:57
  So we started to invest in coaching to be able to set up a format where we're problem solving, basically.
• 7:04
  So the principles of coaching is actually staff being able to think through their problems rather than us as leaders fighting fire.
• 7:13
  And the staff members always coming to SLT and saying, how do I do this? How do this?
• 7:17
  Can I ask permission for that we found that empowering staff for them to be responsible for what they're doing has been really, really great, basically.
• 7:27
  And also when it comes to teachers, as such, we've been looking at how we can look at that flexible working because we felt that actually teachers need trust, trust in their roles.
• 7:38
  And we felt that actually we spent a lot of time looking at how we do PPA because we were finding, particularly when I joined the school, if PPA was what I would call close to the classroom.
• 7:50
  So say in a PPA room, in the school or staff room, or another sort of space that we're losing dramatically within specialist settings because of the place being packed.
• 7:59
  We found teachers were drawn into the classroom.
• 8:01
  So if something happened, they were drawn in and we had a big list of owed PPA that was getting a bit soul destroying So we actually took the decision to make sure people have PPA from home.
• 8:12
  And then we looked at and we thought there's no point if you're just doing an afternoon, 2.5 hours to go home.
• 8:16
  So what we did was we did a strategy of putting two weeks PPA together and give people work from home once every two weeks.
• 8:25
  So every teacher at Greenside has the opportunity to work from home in their PPA once every two weeks. We trust them.
• 8:32
  You know, for some teachers, as a head teacher, I don't mind if they're really able to do their job.
• 8:36
  They can go to the gym, they can go to drop off their kids at school.
• 8:39
  You know, they can do anything they want of that day.
• 8:42
  But as long as they meet the requirements of the role, and we try also to be very conscious on that work life balance.
• 8:49
  We have a very rigorous no communication after 6 p.m.
• 8:54
  and really we don't have meetings before half eight in the morning.
• 8:58
  And I felt that not many things are that important, that they need an email straight away, or they need a meeting straight away as well Flipping back to the recruitment side of things then TA’s particularly, so a recent NFER study showed that 75% of headteachers are struggling to recruit teaching assistants.
• 9:15
  Now in specialist education, we need an army of really effective TA’s for schools to run.
• 9:21
  So I'm assuming that's something that has been on your mind.
• 9:25
  And again, just really interested to know how the recruitment process and the induction works in Greenside.
• 9:32
  Have you found you've had to adapt it to sort of address some of the barriers to recruitment?
• 9:37
  Recruitment’s a key So strategically we are looking at having a people strategy.
• 9:41
  So having that as a core part and I think all schools should have that most businesses have them and most organisations they are once again over a number of years.
• 9:49
  And our people strategy that we're developing at the moment is looking at what the future is with the market of where we're getting recruits from.
• 9:57
  So TA recruitment has always been a challenge.
• 10:00
  For many years, it used to be challenge on kind of the quality or whether you're getting the applications.
• 10:06
  We're based in Stevenage.
• 10:07
  So, for instance, I speak to my other colleagues, in special schools they go you’re lucky you’re in Stevenage, there's thousands of people that you can have you have a special school that's in the countryside, that might not necessarily be as easy.
• 10:18
  But actually we've found our recruitment processes are based more on the values of the staff member, I've had people that have come in and been amazing TA’s but they couldn't write an application form to save their life.
• 10:31
  And actually they recruited and interviewed not very well but actually what is the job they're doing?
• 10:37
  Their job is not to be asked questions in a room in a stressful situation and do a task in a room writing things down.
• 10:45
  Their role is actually to be in the classroom with the young people.
• 10:49
  So our recruitment process has changed over the last couple of years to be more focused on getting the person to be in the class.
• 10:55
  So we always put them with the youngest pupils beucase it's amazing how many people struggle with play with young people, and actually learning through play is a big part of specialist settings and is a big part of primary schools, we always make sure they go in two different types of classroom in the school, so they spend some time in our youngest group where we know that there's opportunities for that sort of early learning play, and we also have them in another part of the school.
• 11:20
  So just see the contrast, and also TA’s as part of their role we want them to be flexible and adaptable to the needs.
• 11:26
  For instance, in the next couple of years, we know we've got 20 young people leaving, so those that work within our preparing adulthood our oldest learners might get a bit of a culture shock in two years because we won't necessarily have the same people in that area of the school.
• 11:40
  So a lot of what we've made sure of our recruitment process is to make sure we're looking at what values, what is the person we need.
• 11:47
  recently we've changed the questions to actually understand them a bit more, We can always teach skills we can't necessarily teach.
• 11:56
  things like the commitment that they might have to the organisation, our values are about respect, are about being kind to each other because we work in teams, we're a team place organisation.
• 12:08
  And we all know that schools and universities and stuff don't necessarily teach that teamwork.
• 12:13
  So some respects it's very important, particularly now with the new recruitment and the Employment Act coming in and the fact that we need to focus more on the recruitment rather than the induction process and the probation period, because that's going to be very hard we make sure we take time.
• 12:28
  We always have an interview process that kind of takes most of the day for TA’s but it's not necessarily intense for SLT.
• 12:34
  It might be a case if we put them in classes and let them relax.
• 12:37
  There's no point putting them in the class and having SLT in the corner of a clipboard.
• 12:40
  No one's going to relax in that.
• 12:41
  Let's leave them there for an hour or so so they can talk to Tas about the role.
• 12:46
  They can talk to the teachers, they can spend time with the young people.
• 12:49
  And that is probably 80% of the decision making on whether we recruit someone is how they are in that context.
• 12:57
  And that's really interesting, isn't it?
• 12:58
  Because I guess you go for a head teacher recruitment panel and it is all day if you're going to get through to the sort of second stage of it.
• 13:05
  But I suppose for roles like TA’s where they're not particularly well paid, we're really mindful not to use people's time for for free.
• 13:12
  You need to know that the job you're getting into is what you think it is.
• 13:16
  So I think for me, having that practical experience, that ability to really sort of taste the workplace, to to see how it runs, to get a sense of the culture and, the school's values is really, really important.
• 13:26
  I think a lot of this thinking we've had around recruitment really is being thrown up in the air as, the crisis bites a bit and we're forced to rethink.
• 13:34
  And they need to think about we spend all that time with headteachers to imply that that's a really, really important role in the school.
• 13:41
  But the reality is, the fact I'm sitting here is a good example.
• 13:44
  I'm not necessarily the most important person in the school, and we need to make everyone in the school feel important.
• 13:50
  Because you're right, it does feel that since Covid, attendance and absence has increased and there could be loads of different reasons for that, but it is the biggest challenge we have at schools at the moment is we have that recruitment, but also that attendance challenge.
• 14:05
  I think you can put all the wonderful things you want to achieve as a school, but if you've got so many staff off each day and you can't cover that equals can equal a cycle of the school not performing as it has done.
• 14:18
  But I think you've got to start it off on straight off that actually yours is you know, sometimes it's the most important role in the school.
• 14:26
  You know, we need to have TA’s in specialist settings.
• 14:29
  They are really well valued and the value needs to come through from straight as they come through the door.
• 14:34
  So not felt like they're just shuffled through or we've got ten of these we're just getting through.
• 14:38
  They need to see that actually you are valued here.
• 14:41
  And then kind of support that with a with a CPD offer that is really focused on their needs.
• 14:47
  I think a lot of schools don't put enough energy, and we didn't for a number of years at Greenside, into that CPD offer and really spending the time focusing on what we're delivering.
• 14:58
  People want to give their time.
• 15:00
  And you know, in our school they stay later on a Wednesday night.
• 15:04
  But we felt like they were doing the same sort of training, you know, those statutory ones, all the normal sorts of bits and bobs.
• 15:11
  But actually now we've put more energy in making sure that they have training and then time to reflect on that training and then come back.
• 15:19
  So it's not just the case of keep going with the training and just pummel them with information.
• 15:24
  They need to come and embed that and then reflect back.
• 15:27
  So a training cycle for the for the staff in different sorts of ways can be really effective.
• 15:32
  We have big staff teams.
• 15:33
  So we have 150 staff so we can't all fit in one room And also every member of staff is different.
• 15:38
  So there's not many training that actually means that everyone gets something out of it.
• 15:43
  It's very hard to pitch, so we put them in different groups.
• 15:46
  I'm starting at the moment of thinking about looking at different cycles of training that people could be part of, so a group could have one cycle.
• 15:53
  So a six week training block on speech and language therapy supported by our therapist team.
• 15:59
  Having six weeks really focused on it is more impactful than having it all bitty in lots of different ways.
• 16:05
  So we're really trialing that at the moment.
• 16:07
  Having these learning cycles within the school teams that will all come together each on the Wednesday and build on their learning and each week have opportunities to reflect because that's truly professional learning.
• 16:20
  And that professional learning shouldn't just be for executive at work, at Google and stuff.
• 16:23
  They should just as much be in our schools.