Tag Archives: DfE vacancy site

Pick a teacher by computer

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There’s a story on the BBC news site today about AI being used by some companies in their staff recruitment process. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55932977 Well, that’s nothing new. Maybe that it is just that the technology has become jazzier and snazzier that it used to be.

Way back in the 1980s, I recall a US company telling me it could select who would be a good primary school teacher on the basis of a few questions answered over the telephone. They told me it worked for selecting ice-hockey players, so would work for primary school teachers.

In the mid-1990s, during my brief period as a government adviser, I headed off another challenge to abolish interviews for all aspiring teachers, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Success was due to being joined in support by a prominent HMI of the day. Together we made the case for interviews, even though it was both time-consuming and costly.

I would not want the DfE to suggest the automated route for teacher selection be used by the new Institute of Teaching its role in both initial teacher training preparation and professional development. Imagine being judged as to whether you could be funded for a professional development course on the basis of playing a computer game.

Well, I suppose, if you think about the concept, it not all that different to how some schools and local authorities still select pupils for secondary schools at age eleven. Interestingly, we haven’t heard much about deprivation and the pandemic on the selection of pupils at age eleven, especially in the Home Counties that still cling in some areas to the Victorian notion that pupils’ life chances can be determined at age eleven.

Of course, when there are a lot of job applications, as during a recession, there is a tendency to use tactics to save time in the recruitment process. In the early days of postcodes, I recall two headteachers behaving differently. One rejected every application with a postcode as being pedantic: the other rejected everyone without such a code as not being thorough. Candidates had no idea which approach was going to see them through the next stage.

Still, the increase in applications for teaching posts, reported recently by NfER, is something this blog predicted at the start of the pandemic. Interestingly, vacancies for teachers so far in February are higher than they were in January, but the total for the year is still down on last year.

Judging by the vacancies on the DfE site, support staff vacancies are down even more than those for teachers. I suppose there is less need for classroom assistants and cover supervisors while pupils largely remain at home. Senior posts, such as those for finance officers and business managers are still cluttering up what is badged as a teacher vacancy site.

Despite persuading a few morel local authorities to link their job boars to the DfE site, it still carries far fewer vacancies than TeachVac www.teachac.co.uk and is of no use to teachers that want a post in an independent school.

Teacher Vacancy Platforms: Pros and Cons

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In this post, I look at the three key sites for teacher vacancies in England. TeachVac; the DfE Vacancy site and The TES. Now this is not an unbiased look, because I am Chair of the company that owns TeachVac. Indeed, it might be regarded as an advertisement, so treat it in that way if you read on.

TeachVac is in the process of filing its accounts for the year to June 2020 with Companies House. The DfE doesn’t file accounts, and the TES has filed accounts up to the end of August 2019, with a forward comment about the possible effects of the covid pandemic in the year to August 2020.

All three sites cost teachers nothing to use during the last year. However, the DfE site only offers vacancies in state schools, and only a proportion of those schools. TeachVac estimates that in 2020 the DfE proportion of vacancies for teaching posts never rose above 40% of the vacancies open to teachers across both state and private schools. So, the DfE is worthwhile if you only want a job in a state-funded school. Both TeachVac and the TES offer vacancies in state and private schools, although TeachVac doesn’t cover all private schools with pupils below the age of eleven. The TES coverage depends upon those prepared to pay to advertise vacancies on their platform.

Both TeachVac and the DfE site have no direct financial cost to schools. However, the DfE site does require schools to input vacancies into the site. This is optional for TeachVac, and most schools are happy to rely upon the automatic vacancy collection process operated by TeachVac. The TES has a number of options, all require schools to pay for their vacancies to appear on the TES job site and be matched with teachers.

TeachVac also offers users a monthly newsletter on the state of the market for teachers.

The operating cost for TeachVac in 2019/20 was just £1.10 per vacancy processed. Neither the DfE nor The TES publishes a similar figure, but the TES accounts would suggest their cost per vacancy is much higher than that of TeachVac. To find out the cost of the DfE site would need a parliamentary question.

So, are teacher associations, governors and school business managers and those responsible for local authorities, diocese and MATs recommending TeachVac as the most cost effective means of displaying and matching vacancies? Of course not.

Are they recommending teachers to use Teachvac, some are, others aren’t. Course leaders preparing teachers are now recommending TeachVac as a place for trainees to look for their first vacancy. Those trainees are sticking with TeachVac to find subsequent jobs and promotion opportunities.

I am proud of the achievements of the TeachVac team in driving down costs of vacancy advertising. Next the team will start to look at other parts of the recruitment journey to see if there are saving to be made in other areas as well.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to sponsor the TeachVac site, my investors are always open to discussions.

Suggestions on Savings ahead of the Spending Review

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How might the Chancellor save money on education? Apart that is from the possible pay freeze? Over the years this blog has explored a number of different possibilities for savings. Two obvious ones are in the teacher preparation market and the cost of advertising vacancies.

The DfE uses the Teacher Supply Model to identify how many places to fund for teacher preparation courses going forward. Each year, it seems to overfund the number of places in subjects such as history and physical education, so that there are always trainees looking for teaching posts at the end of the year. Should the modelling also take into account data about vacancies to match against that of the other inputs, such as pupil numbers and the proxies for vacancies currently used in the model? Possibly several millions could be saved in fees paid to universities.

The other saving championed regularly by this blog, albeit with a degree of self-interest, is the spending on recruitment advertising by schools. The DfE has made an attempt to reduce this expenditure, but it has been half-hearted at best, and lacking in understanding of how the market operates. In the spring I offered the DfE my help in making their site the ‘go to’ place for teachers seeking jobs, but was rebuffed. Fair enough, but it is worth reading my recent post of the £3 a vacancy cost for recruitment.

Supply teaching is another expensive cost to many schools, especially this year with teachers either self-isolating or off sick with covid-19. Could bringing this spending back ‘in house’ save money by removing the profit element from the cost? Worth a look given that perhaps there will be a million supply cover days this term across the country, if the estimate from one authority that I have seen is grossed up.

Procurement in general is a big area for savings, but like these other savings it challenges the assumption that market-based capitalism will regulate prices. That might be true if schools shopped around, but they don’t, and monopolistic suppliers, whether local or national, have few incentives to reduce prices and introduce new technological solutions that can cut costs for schools.

The whole area of leadership costs must be looked at. How many MAT CEOs do we need across the country? How much more does the system cost to manage than 20 years ago, and is any extra value for money as a result? May be the extra high paid jobs are an incentive for more teachers to stay in the system, rather than leave or better paid jobs elsewhere?

School need more funds, and it is worth reflecting what might happen if effective savings are not made quickly? Some small schools will close, some pupils where parents cannot afford to support the school will possibly receive a worse education than they would have do if funding had been better, and teaching will still not be a career of choice, except in a recession. Even then, it needs to be a global recession, as teachers can now find work anywhere around the world.

More thoughts on school funding

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Earlier this week I listened to the head of a leading group representing private schools tell us how much they saved the State, Their assessment of the amount was based upon the fees they received from parents.

Now, of course, the figure quoted was probably an exaggeration as even if it didn’t include income from overseas students, and the sector is a significant export earner in normal times, then the fees received for pupils resident in this country are higher than the State would be prepared to pay to educate these young people, except in the case of SEND places in specialist schools.

Even allowing for these caveats, if the unemployment associated with the pandemic really does slow down the economy, then, inevitably, some parents may decide that private schooling is something they can no longer afford. There will be bursaries and scholarship and grandparents will offer help, but every child that switches from the private sector to the State sector creates winners and losers and is an additional cost to the State.

Schools that gain pupils will receive extra funding in the fullness of time. However, unless the overall pot of cash increases, there will be less for everyone. With school rolls overall still increasing, especially in the more expensive to fund secondary sector, this possible demand for extra cash could not come at a worse point in the demographic cycles. Any switch to funding for vocational skills, and especially for the Further Education sector, will also make finding additional funding for schools more of a challenge for the Secretary of State in his talks with The Treasury. With pressure to pay the least well-off in society more, increasing teachers’ pay rather than that of support staff may well be a real challenge unless class sizes increase and teacher numbers are reduced.

So, how might schools react? Finding saving won’t be easy, but here are a couple of suggestions. Firstly, and not surprisingly, cut back on recruitment costs. The DfE vacancy site isn’t doing the job it was set up to do. As a result, the profession should create a working party to attack the recruitment costs with the aim of saving schools perhaps £20 million a year. A really effective scheme could save even more.

Secondly, take the profit element out of supply teacher costs. Thirty years ago, local authorities were inefficient and uncoordinated in carrying out this function for schools. Costs have been driven down, but market economics has created a business with a profit element. Removing this element by either taking it back in house or creating a fixed price model could again help save cash for schools.

The third, and most radical suggestion, is around the funding of teachers’ salaries. In the education governance revolution of thirty years ago, decisions about salary bills were delegated to individual schools, with each schools funding being based upon a notional average salary bill. Previously, schools had their salary bill paid for by local authorities based around a framework of school Group Sizes that generated numbers of promoted and leadership posts for each school.

These days. MATs can set salary policies for all their schools, but local authorities cannot for maintained schools. Such policies can affect wage bills, and especially the cost of promoted posts and leadership positions. Young teachers are cheap; older more experienced teachers cost more. Do we want our more experienced teachers leading our more challenging schools? Could a more logical system that took the wage bill for teachers away from schools save money? I don’t know the answer. But, the wage bill is the largest cost in education and it is worth asking the question: how can we protect the income of teachers and other school staff in a time when pressure on the public purse is immense and are their efficiencies that can be made? A notional staffing model that school could test themselves against might be a start. Now is surely time for some radical thinking around the goals we want education to achieve for Society. Depriving the deprived is not one of them.

The author is Chair of TeachVac, the job board for teachers http://www.teachvac.co.uk

Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy?

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As someone that chairs a private limited company operating in the field of teacher recruitment, I always read the annual accounts published by the owners of the TES Group with interest. The latest, just released, provide details for the year up to the 31st August 2019, so aren’t all that recent. Normally, the annual accounts for the previous year appear on the Companies House website sometime in the following May. However, the accounts for the year up to the 31st August 2019 have only recently appeared.

The Group now files its overall Group accounts under the name of Tes Topco, for anyone interested in reading what has happened since the group was sold by one American Group to another.

I can sympathise with the directors. The bottom line for 2018-19 was a loss across the business, after everything, including finance costs, were taken into account, of some £67,000,000. That’s a chunky loss on revenue of less than £100 million, and was generated well before covid-19 affected the teacher recruitment market.

The ‘Attract’ part of the business – basically the on-line recruitment part of the Group, and once the jewel in the crown – registered a decline in turnover compared with the previous year, to around some £61,000,000. It isn’t possible to work out how much of this revenue came from schools in England, how much from schools elsewhere in the United Kingdom and how much for overseas.

However, let’s say schools in England paid upwards of £40,000,000 for what they could obtain for free from either TeachVac or the DfE vacancy website. Interestingly, as far as the TES was concerned, point of sale advertising revenue continued to decline in favour of subscriptions by schools.

This part of the business is supported by the large pool of teachers visiting the site to hunt for a job. Now that teachers are not a scare commodity, will schools want to renew their subscriptions? What happens if jobseekers divert in large numbers to either the DfE site or TeachVac? Is they do, why would schools continue to use the services of the TES job board?

An interesting question is whether the loss per teacher incurred by Tes Topco is anywhere near the level incurred by TeachVac? At present, TeachVac costs less than £3 per vacancy advertised to operate. You can do the maths for the Tes on say £40 million in revenue and possibly, being generous, 70,000 vacancies advertised by schools in England in 2018-19.

Looking forward to the effects of covid-19 on schools, the accompanying report estimates a loss on the vacancy and supply teacher part of the business of some £8 million. This assumes, as at present is the case that schools return for the autumn term, and there is no more lockdown across the board. The latest announcements for the autumn about what might happen do try to protect schools, but I am not sure that these measures will encourage schools to enter the teacher recruitment market unless absolutely necessary.

If TeachVac costs £3 per vacancy, and the DfE can spend anything it likes to keep its vacancy site alive, what future is there for an expensive paid site in England, regardless of whether schools pay for each vacancy advertised or take out a subscription?

I wonder if there is now more value now in the other parts of Tes Topco’s business than in the ‘attract’ part, even though it still dominates the revenue stream for the business.