Are You Resignation Ready?

In this practical article, Clare Skinner shares tips on how to navigate the upcoming teacher resignation season with confidence and clarity

Whether you are budgeting for the new academic year as an academy or settling into your new budget as a maintained school, the May half term resignation deadline for teachers is fast approaching and has the potential for significant decision making in your setting for September so make sure that you are ready!

How Many?

None of us have a crystal ball that enables us to predict how many resignations we can expect for the end of the academic year but what we do have is access to data that will help us to make an informed estimate. If you are not privy to personnel information on a day to day basis then speak to the HR team or your headteacher about those that may be close to normal retirement, are considering ill-health retirement, are going through life events that will impact their personal circumstances which may require a change in working arrangement, have been making lots of requests for employment references recently or were recently in the papers as a lottery winner (we can all dream it will be us one day!). Whilst a lot of this may not be set in stone, it may help you understand the potential costs and risks for recruitment between now and the end of the school year.

Testing Structures

With a sketched-out image of what will be required in your mind, now is the time to make decisions or at least, to build a variety of potential scenarios. With those vacancies in place, what does the timetable look like and what gaps have been created? Link those up with what is affordable from the school’s point of view and complete your ICFP exercise to understand whether there is scope to remove, reduce or combine vacancies across your school or even your Trust. If nothing else, it will help you to prioritise which vacancies you are happy to invest more in that others in terms of pay rates and whether you need to offer a recruitment & retention allowance etc. Whilst some vacancies will be a really straightforward like for like replacement, most of them should create discussion, interrogation and consideration even if it just around value for money on the review of the job description for a TLR holder or senior leader position under review.

The other thing to consider is about retention of teaching staff; do some of the vacancies under review offer the opportunity for internal promotion to a post rather than external recruitment. In the current climate with teaching staff being hard to recruit, this is an opportunity that we must all exploit; not only will it aid retention through career progression, but it will also save money on recruitment costs from advertising to DBS checks, to health screening and the time it takes to induct new colleagues.

How to Find The Staff You Need

Once you know that the vacancy is necessary and you are ready to go out to advert fully understanding what you are going out for, make sure your recruitment is effective. Target it by using the appropriate online portal whichever provider that may be, don’t forget to link it up to the free DfE teacher vacancies website, your school website and share it with all your staff in case they know anyone that may be looking. Consider generational changes in the workforce and maximise your use of social media as well; Gen X may well be traditional job hunters through well-established and more traditional routes, but Gen Z are more agile and phone based in their job searches – make sure your adverts are positioned appropriately in the market you are aiming for and make sure that your application process doesn’t create barriers across the generations.

One thing you may have identified when testing your staffing structures is a need to balance your staffing and the fact that you want to recruit less experienced teachers. If this is the case then make sure you establish, develop and/or exploit links with local teacher training providers and universities. Get in front of their current cohort and know what they have to offer so that you can include a personal approach to recruitment for your vacancies and make those potential employees feel really wanted.

The Landscape

Recruiting teachers is hard, retention is more difficult than ever and budgets, well we all know about budgets. With all of this in mind we need to ensure that we are effective and efficient in this part of the school’s operation – we simply cannot afford to waste time or money. So, get ready, it is a busy time…when is it not though?!