Cut recruitment costs

TeachVac is currently receiving a number of calls from schools that are finding either very few or no responses to their adverts for teaching posts. This is not a surprise to me because this blog has been predicting a very challenging recruitment round in 2023 ever since the DfE published its ITT census in December of 2022.

However, I imagine it must be galling to a school leadership team to have handed over thousands of pounds for recruitment advertising and not to have received a single response to an advert. TeachVac was founded on the principle that modern technology could reduce prices dramatically. Up until this year, schools have often ignored the cost of advertising on the grounds that their recruiter delivered results. Not anymore.

TeachVac has been offering secondary schools a three-month deal of £125 for unlimited vacancies during the three months that covered the key recruitment season. This offer is still available at www.teachvac.co.uk

For schools thinking about their recruitment budget for the next school year starting in September,  TeachVac will offer secondary schools the same package as this year; £500 for unlimited matches for all teaching jobs advertised during the year.

As an incentive, secondary schools signing up in June will only pay £400 if they pay on sign-up or £500 if invoiced in August. Primary schools continue to pay £75 for the year. Groups of schools can benefit from further discounts depending upon the volume of vacancies and the number of schools in the grouping.

Currently, TeachVac also has rates for agencies and other non-school advertisers wanting to match their teaching jobs with TeachVac’s database of jobseekers. Rates start from as low as £3 per vacancy registered, with users identifying the specific local authority area where the school with the vacancy is located and £10 for matches across a government region such as London or the South East. Matches are made for 21 days or until the closing date for the vacancy.

TeachVac’s database of registered users is growing by the day. As a ‘closed’ system users need to register to be matched with vacancies as they are posted. This means that TeachVac has an accurate count of registered users. The basic service remains free to teachers seeking a job.

TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk invites schools to discuss any specific needs beyond the basic service offered, including the wider placement of vacancies on social media, and advertorials about the benefits of working in the school.

TeachVac has a wealth of information on the job market, and can produce reports tailored to the needs of MATs; local authorities; dioceses or others interested in the working of the labour market.

Unlike the DfE site, TeachVac’s closed system does not muddle up non-teaching and teaching posts and also offers teachers the chance to see job opportunities across both state and private sector schools in one place.

TeachVac is backed by eight years of operation and staff with 40 years of knowledge of the labour market for teachers. It is also UK owned.

Recruiting teachers: a real challenge

This morning a school complained on a social media site that they had advertised a senior maths teacher post, but received no applications at all. Is it right to interpret this fact to mean that there is a real crisis in teacher recruitment? Regular readers of this blog – and thank you to those that sent me comments after the 10th anniversary post last week – will know that I have highlighted the issue of shortage of entrants into the profession that eventually feeds through to create a shortage of middle leaders in some subjects in several posts. The assumption must be that this is what has happened in this instance.

However, while not decrying that analysis, there are some other questions to ask first. Why did nobody from inside the school apply? Is it because the department is full of young and inexperienced teachers that spend only a few years in the school before moving on to posts that pay more?

Was the incentive offered in line with others locally, and enough to attract incomers if the school is in a high-cost housing area?

Why did nobody from the local area apply? Is it to do with the school or the salary?

I asked TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk to look up the data for promoted posts in mathematics advertised by schools during January 2023 for the East of England region, as an example of what the school might expect. There were 27 such vacancies up to the 30th of January, and around 50 registered jobseekers targeting such posts in that part of England. On average that is less than two potential applicants per school. Assuming most applicants make more than one application, let’s assume the school might have expected up to 10 visits to the web site to look at the details of the job, and somewhere between 2-5 applications.

However, early January may just be too early in the recruitment cycle for September appointments for most teachers seeking either a promotion or their first teaching post to have commenced their job searches. January is a great month to be looking for a new headteacher, but may not be the optimal time for recruiting for other posts.

Schools also need to understand how the job board methodology works. When a school posts a new job, it will be matched that day or the next by most boards with registered users that meet the criteria for subject, job level and locality. Although the vacancy will remain on display for anyone searching the site, it is often not sent to existing users again for a period of time.

Job boards should be able to tell schools how many matches they have made with the school’s vacancies. For one Multi Academy Trust in the South East using TeachVac, the current average for all jobs is around 180 matches since September.

I would suggest that schools need to think carefully about each vacancy and plan a campaign to fill the job. A main scale history post advertised in February should be filled by just putting the job on the school’s own website, and if necessary a job board. A physics teacher post for January occurring in November needs an entirely different approach. Is it worth spending the same amount on each vacancy? And how good is your market intelligence?

Best wishes to DfE Vacancy site

It is time to wish the DfE Vacancy site all the best for the festive season. The DfE vacancy site is a good place to look for non-teaching posts: TeachVac doesn’t cover these vacancies at present, but is seeking to do so during 2023 using new investment funding. As of this morning, 37% of the vacancies on the DfE site were for non-teaching appointment, and a small percentage of the teaching posts were actually ‘job opportunities’ rather than stated jobs.

One non-teaching post that caught our eye, and illustrates the challenges such a site faces was posted by a selective school, although it could have been posted by any school.

Job details Chef de Partie Tournant

Job role

Working pattern

  • Part-time – 30 hours per week, Mon-Fri, 8.30am-2.30pm, term time only (38 weeks). Some flexibility will sometimes be needed to alter hours for occasional school events.

Contract type

Permanent

Full-time equivalent salary

FTE £20623, with the opportunity to rise to £21879 depending on performance

Actual salary

£14266 (rising to £15135)

What skills and experience we’re looking for

We have an exciting opportunity to join our in-house kitchen team. You will be using your skills to prepare and serve food throughout the school day, so that we offer students a varied, wholesome and tempting balance of foods. This role makes a vital contribution to nurturing students’ life-long interest and independence in making healthy eating choices. We are looking for an individual who can bring good humour, strong communication skills, flexibility, and attention to detail to the kitchen.

The salary works out at £12.51 per working hour, and unlike most in the catering trade there presumably will be no opportunities for tips on top. With the present recruitment challenges in the hospitality area, good luck to the school that is also seeking housekeeping staff.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that the limitation of the DfE site means that the job role appears under Learning support, cover supervisor or tutor – none of these classifications really fit the job description.

How does the 1,488 teaching vacancies on the DfE site compare with TeachVac today? The TeachVac counter is currently showing 3,834 teaching jobs, so more than double the DfE’s total. To be fair to the DfE they don’t include vacancies for teachers in private schools, and they may have different cut off dates for the length of time a vacancy is listed.

However, if you were a teacher job hunting which of the two free sites would you choose to register with? If you know which school you want to work in, and that school uses the DfE site, you can choose either site. However, if you have any degree of uncertainty, TeachVac has provided more opportunities.   

Schools should note that in 2023 their jobs will only be matched if they register with TeachVac and pay an annual fee of £500 maximum for secondary schools, and £75 for primary schools, payable for new registrations from February 2023. Vacancies at other schools will continue to be logged, but not matched with candidates.

The staff at TeachVac, http://www.teachvac.co.uk where I remain as Chair, wish all readers the best for the festive season and we look forward to 2023; may it be a better year than the one just ending.

Why TeachVac is important

Earlier this month I posted about the ITT Census of trainees published by the DfE. I noted in one post that it was necessary to remove from the ITT census those trainees not likely to be looking for a teaching post because they are already in a school on salaried schemes.

From the reduced total also needs to be removed a percentage for in-course wastage and a desire by some teachers to work outside of the state school system in either private schools or Sixth Form/further education colleges.

What is left is the free pool that might look for a teaching post anywhere.

SubjectOpen Market
Mathematics1,467
Physical Education1,295
English1,214
History950
Chemistry644
Modern Languages600
Geography523
Biology495
Art & Design440
Other387
Design & Technology372
Physics366
Computing304
Drama304
Religious Education249
Music228
Business Studies164
Classics52
Total secondary10,054

From the list it seems clear that there are unlikely to be enough new entrants to satisfy the demand for teachers by schools in 2023 unless there is a substantial pay rise for teachers or other demands upon funding dampen demand below the level seen in 2022. To some extent demand will be affected by the actions of teachers already in the workforce. Early retirement, plus income from tutoring and some ‘supply’ teacher work might look attractive to some teachers in the latter stages of their career and with enough pension rights to feel confident about leaving full time teaching.

At TeachVac www.teachvac. We help match teachers to vacancies that meet their needs. Price at just £500 per year for secondary schools and just £75 for primary schools TeachVac has made 2 million matches in 2022 from over 100,000 vacancies listed and our pool of teacher sis growing rapidly at the present time as teachers start to think about where and what they want to teach in September.

Schools signing up to TeachVac now, won’t be invoiced until February and thus need not pay until early March. By then, they may well have already received more than 500 matches that covers the annual fee making all further matches effectively cost free.

Dear Prime Minister

Would you like some good news? On your return from Birmingham, you will no doubt be asking Ministers how their departments can save money. Here is one suggestion. I am not unbiased in making this suggestion, as it could benefit TeachVac, the job board that I chair. However, TeachVac was in existence before the DfE started its own version and has consistently shown how to achieve a low-cost approach to vacancy listing as our accounts at Companies House will confirm. Reviewing the DfE site could also save the government money.

We suggested originally that the DfE need only provide a page pointing those seeking teaching posts to available sites in the private sector, and another for schools showing the relative costs of using different sites. However, in response to the Public Accounts Committee, the DfE decided on a more costly intervention and created its own job board.

TeachVac is currently offering secondary schools a deal of 12 months of unlimited matches for just £250 and a mere £50 for primary schools. How much per vacancy does the DfE cost to provide?

Reproduced below is a post from 2020 that further makes the case for saving money on the DfE’s job board. Our monitoring since then suggests that the DfE site has gained little traction in the market and may be losing ground in terms of teaching vacancies uploaded.

DfE and Teacher Vacancies: Part Two

Posted on April 3, 2021

The DfE is spending more money supporting their latest venture into the teacher recruitment market. SchoolsWeek has uncovered the latest moves by the government to challenge existing players in this market https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-leans-on-mats-to-boost-teacher-job-vacancies-website-take-up/ in an exclusive report.

The current DfE foray into the recruitment market follows the failure of the Fast Track Scheme of two decades ago and the Schools Recruitment Service that fizzled out a decade ago. The present attempt also came on the heels of the fiasco around a scheme to offer jobs in challenging schools in the north of England that never progressed beyond the trial phase.

The present DfE site rolled out nationally two years ago this month. How successful it has been was the subject of a SchoolsWeek article earlier this year. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfes-teacher-job-website-carries-only-half-of-available-positions/  This blog reviewed the market for vacancy sites for teachers last December, in a post entitled Teacher Vacancy Platforms: Pros and Cons that was posted on December 7, 2020.

In that December post, I looked at the three key sites for teacher vacancies in England. TeachVac; the DfE Vacancy site and the TES. As I pointed out, this was not an unbiased look, because I am Chair of the company that owns TeachVac. Indeed, I said, it might be regarded as an advertisement, and warned readers to treat it in that way.

There is an issue with how much schools spend on recruitment of teachers. After all, that was why TeachVac was established eight years ago. The DfE put the figure in their evidence to the STRB this year at around £75 million; a not insubstantial figure.

Will TeachVac be squeezed out in a war between the DfE backed by unlimited government funding and the TES with a big American backer? At the rate TeachVac is currently adding new users, I don’t think so. After all, the DfE site doesn’t cover independent schools, and in the present market I believe that most teachers want a site that allows access to all teaching jobs and not just some. That benefits both TeachVac and the TES as well as other players in the market, such as The Guardian and SchoolsWeek, as well as recruitment agencies.

How much the DfE will need to spend on ensuring they cover the whole of the state-funded job market in terms of acquiring vacancies by the ‘school entering vacancies’ method is another interesting question? As is, how much will it also cost to drive teachers to using the DfE site and not TeachVac or the TES?

A view of TeachVac’s account reveals that TeachVac provides access to more jobs for teachers at less than the DfE is going to spend on promoting their site over the next few months. Such spending only makes good commercial sense if you want to remove a player from the market.

So, here’s a solution. Hire TeachVac to promote the DfE site and use the data TeachVac already generates to monitor the working of the labour market. After all, that was also one of the suggestions from the Public Accounts Committee Report that spurred the DfE into action and the creation of their present attempt at running a vacancy site.

How much to advertise a teacher vacancy?

Should a foreign owned company earn around £50 million from recruitment advertising largely paid for by schools located in England? I previously wrote about the published accounts of the tes a couple of years ago Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy? | John Howson (wordpress.com) This morning, Companies House published the TES GLOBAL Ltd accounts for 2020-21 covering the period up to the end of August 2021. The turnover in the UK of the Group was some £54 million; up from pre-pandemic levels of just under £52 million. Most of the income comes from subscription advertising, where schools pay the company an annual fee. Transactional advertising income continued to form a much smaller part of the company’s turnover.

Now, as regular readers of this blog are aware, I am not unbiased when it comes to the issue of recruitment advertising and the teacher vacancy market, having helped create TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk  well before the DfE started their job board.

There is an interesting question as to why schools are prepared to use TeachVac and the DfE site, but still pay shedloads of cash to the owners of the tes job board? For some it will be just inertia: nobody ever got fired for using the established player in the market. For some it will no doubt be a belief that tes has more teachers looking for vacancies than any other platform. TeachVac requires registration, so we know a lot more about our active job seekers than job boards that don’t require a sign-up. Interestingly, there seems little data in the tes accounts about usage of their platform by teachers. TeachVac regularly publishes data on matches, having passed the one million for 2022 earlier this week.

TeachVac has been dedicated to prove the concept that job boards don’t need to be expensive, and its current pricing model of £1 per match up to a maximum of £1,000 per school per year for secondary schools, and less for primary schools, is much cheaper than a subscription to tes.

Interestingly, tes has admin expenses of around £60 million, not all spent on the recruitment side of the business. However, it is vastly more than the £150,000 TeachVac costs to do a similar job of matching vacancies to job seekers. With the possibility of 75,000 vacancies on TeachVac this year, that’s a cost of little more than £2 per vacancy for TeachVac, compared with perhaps £4-500 per vacancy listed by the tes extrapolating from the information in the published accounts. This despite the company further reducing its headcount from 191 to 160 at the end of the accounting period.

In their accounts, tes’s owners cite software and development costs of £43,000,000. I wonder what that values that  places on TeachVac’s software when we come to do our annual accounts later this year?

Overall, TES GLOBAL Ltd has returned to losses in 2020-21, after a profit in the year before, when they sold their teacher supply business. The company still has a large interest burden effectively being serviced by schools.

The question, as ever, is, how long will schools be prepared to pay these prices for recruitment advertising when cheaper options are available?

Recruitment 2022: a rough ride to come

Can you tell anything about the 2022 recruitment round for teachers in England based upon just four days of vacancy data? One of the advantages of a job board such as TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk is the it has sufficient cumulative data on vacancies that can be allied with data about the numbers of teachers on preparation courses to be able to provide some helpful comments on the labour market, even after just four days of data.

For those that are sceptical of such a claim, consider sampling theory. A simple example is to assume a bowl of soup. A small spoonful will tell you whether or not the bowl if full of hot soup. Now scale up to a vat size container. Will a small sample tell you the same answer for the whole? Now purists might maintain that the bottom of the vat could be hotter than the top; I would agree. Taking that comment to vacancy data means that the comments for England as a whole might well include differences across the regions. Such an objection is true, and that is why each month TeachVac produces regional data for most secondary subjects and the primary sector. But it doesn’t invalidate sampling as a useful tool.

Anyway, back to our sample of 2022, and what I think it tells schools about the recruitment round this year. The first point is that it confirms what was being said at the end of 2021, appointments for September 2022 will be more of a challenge almost across the board as the 2020 bounce in interest in teaching as a career drops out of the supply side.

How bad will 2022 be? Well, nothing of concern in art, PE and history. Indeed, schools might well be starting to consider whether they can make use of an extra history teacher and perhaps an extra PE teacher to make use of the best of the trainees with second subject expertise in the pool of jobseekers.

At the other end of the scale, the usual suspects of design and technology where there will be real issues with recruitment have been joined this year by geography, modern languages and English. In the case of the latter two subjects this is partly because of the number of trainees on courses that will either already have placed them in the classroom or make it likely that they won’t be looking on the open market for a teaching post. Independent schools should take especial note of this fact when considering how easy it will be to recruit a teacher.

Most of the other subjects have seen the size of their ‘free pool’ decline this year compared with 2021, and that will have implications for January 2023 appointments. Such vacancies may be hard to fill in many subjects in those parts of England where recruitment is a challenge; namely London and the Home Counties.

Schools that have signed up to TeachVac’s £1,000 maximum annual recruitment package will receive regular updates on the state of the labour market, including local knowledge. On registration, and at no cost, schools receive a detailed report on the labour market.

Recruiters tell me that TeachVac is ‘too cheap’ to succeed because nothing that cheap could be any good. My principle in founding the job board was to show that recruitment advertising need not cost a lot of money. I still believe that to be true. Do you?

Covid and the Teacher Labour Market in England

We now have data from twelve months that have suffered from the effects of the covd-19 pandemic. First thing this morning, I asked my analysts at TeachVac what had been the consequences for the teacher labour market in England. They came up with the following table for all vacancies.

2018201920202021
March715990299302
April813187356080
May10170114686357
June386248283286
July93312941043
August547565543
September295538843382
October418654383721
November366242583074
December201528931811
January5492638682162622
February5056579184215167
Monthly recorded vacancies for teachers in England

Source: TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk

Secondary teachers have suffered from a greater decline in their job opportunities than their primary colleagues. However, with the modern equivalent of ‘pool’ recruitment still in operation in parts of the primary sector, the figures are less reliable for that sector the for the secondary school sector where most schools manage their own recruitment.

Details data for local authority vacancy patterns and even those for a specific postcode are available on request, for a small fee. Data are also available for specific secondary subjects on a month by month basis, again for a small fee.

The next two months will be key ones for teachers looking for jobs. Will the market return to 2019 levels or continue to remain depressed. Much may depend upon the behaviour of the wider labour market for graduates. However, how many teachers decide to leave their jobs will also be important. It is also worth remembering that he supply of teachers leaving teacher preparation courses will not be sufficient in all subjects to meet the DfE’s estimate of need. How far ‘returners’ can make up the deficit only time will tell, but fewer advertised vacancies will also help close the gap.

I, for one, had wondered whether the pandemic and resulting effects on head teacher’s workload, might have resulted in a wave of departures. So far, in 2021, there is little evidence of any surge in departures of primary head teachers.

Although there have been fewer vacancies in London during the past twelve months, the Home Counties, and especially those parts of the Home Counties in the South East remain the part of the country driving the teacher labour market. This is not surprising as this are also contains the largest concentration of private schools. So far, these schools do not seem, as a sector, to have been badly affected by the pandemic in terms of pupil numbers. No doubt September enrolment will conform whether that is still the case.

Finally, although pupil numbers are still increasing in the secondary sector, will there be any effect from Brexit? Might some EU families return to their home country rather than stay in England? If so, could such departures have an effect on school rolls in some areas where there are large concentrations of EU citizen living in particular neighbourhoods? Comments on this point would be welcome.

Is the teacher job market changing?

Earlier this week Will Hazell, the relatively new education reporter for the i newspaper and a former TES journalist, produced a piece about agencies charging schools a ‘recruitment fee’ after signing up teachers looking for jobs. Since governments of all complexions have been happy to leave teacher recruitment as a free market activity, why wouldn’t commercial organisations aim to help schools solve a recruitment issues for a price. After all, schools have been paying local authorities, the TES and other newspapers to place job adverts for many years. Indeed,  even search agencies are also not a new phenomenon in the marketplace. In addition, there are other new approaches to recruitment as schools seek direct marketing and MATs use central recruitment pages for all their schools.

However, what might be acceptable as a fringe activity affecting only a small number of schools can become a matter of public concern if a greater number of schools are involved and the sums being made reach significant amounts.

As I have written before on this blog, why wouldn’t busy teachers and trainees take the bait offered by agencies if it makes their life easier? Selling yourself on every application form you complete takes far more time compared with filling out just one registration form per agency you register with and is a no brainer, especially with the amount of work teachers and trainees face during term-times.

Even where jobs are easy to find, because the supply exceeds demand, teachers can benefit from a system that reduces their need to complete a series of application forms on the off chance they might come second in an interview. But all this costs schools money. Even so, advertising hasn’t traditionally be free, and can take up more time an effort if there either isn’t much interest and either a re-advertisement is necessary or there are lots of applications and time has to be spent by a group of staff short-listing candidates for interview. These costs need to be set against any finders fee.

In the past, I have pointed out that knowing the state of the job market helps schools to choose the most cost-effective path to recruitment. Want a business studies teacher in London or the Home Counties, then paying an agency on a ‘no find, no fee’ basis might be cost effective from the end of February onwards. Want a PE teacher or a historian at the same time of year, and agencies might still be cost effective in saving staff time sorting through lots of applications, especially with the risk of ensuring there is no discrimination in your short-listing process.

So, should there be a public sector registration point where candidates must register if they want a teaching post, and that can manage supply and demand more effectively than the market?

TeachVac already knows where the bulk of the jobs are and can offer schools a service telling them how many potential applicants have been match with a vacancy. TeachVac can also tell candidates how many jobs in a selected area meet their parameters in a given time period, and also advise when a candidate’s search area is not wide enough for them to expect to have a good chance of securing a teaching post. This data changes as the school-year progresses.

At present, TeachVac offers its service free to both schools and those seeking teaching jobs. Providing the data about jobs to both schools and teachers has a cost, but it wouldn’t be very high; perhaps £5 per search. Let me know what you think?

 

Should you train to be a teacher?

This is the time of year when final year undergraduates; recent graduates unhappy with their current lot in life and career changers often start to consider teaching as a possible career.

Teaching in England requires more than half a million graduates to provide an education to all children. Even a low departure rate of around five per cent would require more than 25,000 replacement teachers each year, either through new entrants or by those return9gn to teaching. So, even if the economy goes downhill thanks to trade wars and Brexit, there will still be lots of children to educate.

If you are a potential teacher reading this blog, you can visit the DfE’s advice service for potential teachers at https://getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/

One of the questions you might want to ask the advice line is, will I find a teaching post where I want to teach and doing what I want to do when I qualify? May, I suggest that if the person answers ‘yes’ to that question, you press them for some hard evidence. After all, the DfE is now running a vacancy web site for teaching posts, so should be able to answer a simple question such as ‘what are my chances of finding a teaching post?’

Unlike many graduate training programmes, only some teacher preparation courses will guarantee those that complete the course successfully a teaching job. Most, however, will require you to take on extra student debt to pay for the course: in some cases this is ameliorated by a bursary payment made tax-free. In other subjects, where the government considers the supply of entrants is sufficient then there is no bursary available. This fact might be a warning sign about job prospects.

Even where there are bursaries, do you want to commit a year of your life to training to become a teacher only to find there are not enough jobs to meet the supply of teachers where you want to teach? Hence the need to quiz the government’s recruitment advisers about vacancies.

If the government cannot answer your question, then local authority might be able to do so, as many still have teacher recruitment services or at least operate job boards and should know something about the local demand for teachers. However, they may not know what is happening in academies in their area, with regard to job prospects for teachers.

You can also ask course providers during any interviews how successful their trainees are at finding jobs and where they find them?

Finally, I recommend you sign up with a job board that can tell you about real vacancies. Beware vacancies not tied to a specific school: the job might not exist. Some schools these days operate talent pools and collect applications even when they don’t have a vacancy. The best make this clear; some don’t.  You can often spot these apparent vacancies by a lack of any starting date and a long period to the closing date with a comment that appointments may be made before the closing date if a suitable candidate appears.

If you want a job board that is free to both schools and teachers and tries to only match real vacancies with teachers looking for those jobs in specific parts of England, then may I recommend TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk This free national vacancy service was established more than four years ago and currently handles more vacancies than any other free service, including that operated by the DfE.  I am happy to be the Chair of its Board.

If you are considering becoming a history teacher, a teacher of PE or of Modern Languages or indeed a teacher of any subject or a teacher working in the primary sector, then signing up when you are considering teaching as a career can provide evidence of the job market that may help you assess the risk of training to be a teacher.

As the Chair of TeachVac, I would be delighted to welcome you to join with many other teachers, trainees and returners already making use of our free service.

Should you have a wish to teacher overseas, then our global site www.teachvacglobal.com  may be able to help you find a teaching post almost anywhere in the world.