How School Business Managers Can Leverage the School Workforce Census

The School Workforce Census (SWC) offers the Department for Education valuable national data on teachers, but how can school business managers leverage it as a strategic tool? Clare Skinner offers some insights

The SWC allows you to carefully check the data we hold on our biggest and most expensive resource, our people. Use the SWC to do a real housekeeping exercise on that data to ensure that everything is accurate as your first step in using it as a strategic tool. Inaccurate data will cause you problems and invalidate evidence that you may rely on to support proposals and decision-making processes.

ICFP

SWC data will link back to key metrics in Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning and give some substance to your numbers. SWC data will help you to really see where your leadership and management costs sit and allow you apply TLRs appropriately and equitably, in line with levels of responsibility across the school. It will give you clear sight of what hours are being spent teaching each subject and therefore reassure you that the course provides good value for money. You can ensure that all teaching staff are in the right place and teaching the right subjects, generating conversation with your timetabling SLT colleague which can trigger deeper reviews of the curriculum in readiness for the next academic year and when resignations and recruitment is planned.

Payroll

If, like me, your MIS and payroll systems don’t speak to each other then check the SWC against payroll to ensure that both systems are telling the same story; are pay scales set up correctly, are the FTEs correct on both sides, are job roles all correct. Have all leavers be set on the MIS as well as payroll, I appreciate that this sounds like stating the obvious but errors can occur so take this opportunity to check and correct them for your peace of mind. Furthermore, if you do enter this data twice, could the errors you identify, the duplication of effort to enter data into multiple systems and the time it takes to correct them be used as part of a business plan to demonstrate the efficiencies that could be driven through a single-entry software and build your case for best value in this area.

Absence Data

The SWC drives absence data reported through the IDSR from the government, so it is important to understand that the focus here is on teacher, rather than whole school staff, absence information alongside the fact that the period considered is the previous academic year AND up to and including the date of census. As I measure absence on a year-to-date basis, this results in a variance between the information I produce for trustees and the IDSR so it is important to be able to articulate that differences in measuring that data. I use the absence data in the SWC to question how effective absence management is in my setting – does the data in the SWC reflect the number of staff that are on formal absence management processes due to hitting triggers, if not how robust is the sickness absence process and does it need to change?

Equality

How many of your staff have “information not yet obtained” next to their name under the ethnicity or disability data. Does the data quality therefore accurately reflect how seriously you take equality monitoring in your setting? Can the information driven by the SWC help you to adapt and amend your policies around equality in your workforce so that it is reflective of the community you operate in.

Training Needs

If there are issues coming out of the above questions then are there training needs in your setting among those staff that enter the data into your MIS or your payroll, or your finance systems? What needs to happen to ensure that when you do a dry run of the SWC next year, it comes back nice and clean.

Let the SWC Data Work for You!

It can take a few hours, depending on the size of your setting to go through the detailed reports that your MIS will produce for the SWC. With all this activity and review that the SWC can prompt, it is clear that it is not simply an administrative task that has to be completed for the DfE. Take hold of this data and really make it work for you. Allow it to support you to address employee related concerns that you have in your setting whether that is pay, structures, equality, attendance or curriculum and make it strategic rather than just administrative information.