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.

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.

Teaching Vacancies: and where to find them

Schools Week has published an interesting article about the DfE’s vacancy site.

DfE’s teacher job website carries only half of available positions

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfes-teacher-job-website-carries-only-half-of-available-positions/ 

Of course, Schools Week also carries job adverts for teachers and other education positions.

TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk is the main challenger to the TES, as this blog revealed last November.

Regular readers will know that I am also chair of TeachVac that provides a free services and is funded from the data it can supply to the sector, but is now seeking to widen its scope having built a stable platform.

 

 

 

Recruiting Teachers – the cost effective option

I am delighted to announce that TeachVac will be adding the small number of vacancies from the DfE site that TeachVac doesn’t already carry to the TeachVac site. These vacancies are mostly either in new schools recruiting for the first time or primary schools in small MATs with a central recruitment page.

As TeachVac also includes vacancies from independent schools, this will make it the most comprehensive site for anyone interested in either applying for a teaching vacancy or interested in what is happening in the labour market for teachers.

As a result, I have written the following piece as an overview of recruitment in what remains a challenging labour market for teachers. You can sign up to Teachvac at http://www.teachvac.co.uk; it free and easy to do.

There are a number of different options for schools and academy trusts seeking to recruit teachers and school leaders. Put briefly, these are:

  • Free sites such as the DfE site and TeachVac (national coverage) and local authority job boards (local and in some cases regional coverage)
  • Traditional national paid for advertising sites such as The TES, eteach and The Guardian.
  • Local paid for advertising via local newspapers and their websites.
  • Recruitment Agencies of various types, including agencies focused on the supply teacher market.
  • Direct marketing to universities and other providers of teacher preparation courses as well as offering vacancies to teachers in schools during preparation courses.
  • School web sites, including the use of talent banking.

Each of these comes with different costs and benefits.

A single point of contact for free advertising of vacancies for teachers and school leaders has been identified by the National Audit Office; the Education Select Committee and in the 2017 Conservative Party election manifesto as the best way forward.

During 2018 and early 2019 the DfE developed and implemented such a product to operate alongside the already existing TeachVac site designed and operated by a company where Professor John Howson, a long-time authority on the labour market for teachers is the chair of the board.

The advantage of the DfE site is that it has the backing of the government. Potential disadvantages include the fact that it requires schools to upload vacancies and that it only handles vacancies from state funded schools and colleges. A minor distraction is that the site also handles non-teaching vacancies mixed in with the teaching posts. Requiring schools to upload vacancies can be both time consuming and also requires training for new staff to ensure that they can operate the system. The information is limited to that required by the site and isn’t easy to alter without informing all schools of the change.

TeachVac uses technology to collect vacancies every day from school websites and then eyeballing to verify their accuracy. The amount of information collected is greater than on the DfE web site.  A potential disadvantage of TeachVac is that it does not allow users to browse vacancies, but requires specification of a set of requirements for the vacancy sought. This approach has the advantage of also collecting data about the level of interest in specific types of vacancies in specific parts of the country. TeachVac covers both state funded and private schools so provides a one-stop shop for teachers seeking vacancies.

Both sites have the advantage of being free to use for both schools and teachers. The DfE site is subject to the need for government funding and TeachVac must fund itself.

All other approaches, save for schools own web sites and direct marketing by schools to teacher preparation courses, are subject to the profit motive and thus have a cost to schools.

The use of modern technology allows for the combination of approaches by schools, starting with the free options and allowing for the best paid-for alternative should the free option not provide an adequate response to a generated vacancy within a short period of time.

Do let me have your thoughts on how you see the future for the market? Will free sites reduce the ability of paid-for sites to attract vacancies? Will the DfE site become the default site or does it lack of breadth mean teachers will want a site offering all teaching vacancies in one place? Will recruitment agencies become the normal route for entry into the profession for newly qualified teachers and returners? Do the Local government Association and the teacher associations have a role to play in the marketing of vacancies to teachers and monitoring the labour market independent of government?

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.

 

 

 

TeachVac or the DfE site?  

Which free site offers the best approach to finding a teaching job?

There are the only 2 sites for teaching vacancies in England with national coverage that are free to both schools and teachers. One is offered by TeachVac the other is the developing DfE site.

I would add that I have been chair of the group operating TeachVac since its inception over four years ago. TeachVac like the new DfE site came about because of the high cost to schools of recruitment advertising.

TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk uses a defined request approach. Users register and can specify their preferences for phase, location and other key criteria. As vacancies enter the system they are matched and each day details of new matches are sent to registered users to decide whether to take time in finding out more about the school and the vacancy.

This method does not require users to do any searching of the site and preferences can be changed if not enough matches are found in a particular area. The system is simple to use and in periods of the year when there are many jobs on offer – specifically from March to June for classroom teacher posts – applicants do not need to waste time searching through lots of unsuitable vacancies.

The DfE offering is at https://teaching-jobs.service.gov.uk/ and is based around a more traditional open search system that requires teachers to specify filters. A click through on a vacancy also doesn’t take you directly to the school site, but to a more detailed analysis of the vacancy with a link in a sidebar to the vacancy page.

At present, the coverage of the DfE’s site is limited and applicants will have to keep checking to see if the area that they are interested in now live on the DfE site. TeachVac has coverage of the whole of England.

TeachVac includes both independent and all types of state funded primary and secondary schools in its coverage, whereas the DfE only handles state funded schools.

Let’s leave aside the concept of the State taking over from the market in providing a service; something odd to see from a Conservative government.

The DfE, like TeachVac, is trying to save schools money in these straightened financial times, but costs more to operate than TeachVac.

So, register with TeachVac. If it doesn’t meet your requirements, you can easily deregister and be forgotten by the site, then visit the DfE site and see how they compare?

If you like the TeachVac approach – no nonsense, no marketing and daily alerts if new jobs arise, then let me know and tell your friends and colleagues. Please also make suggestions for improvements and possible marketing routes.

TeachVac also tells schools that register with the site about the state of the market when they post a vacancy and has special arrangements for both diocese and multi-academy trusts wanting to list vacancies at several different schools.

To finish with a reminder. TeachVac is free to use for both teachers, returners and schools. It is offered as a service to the education community.

 

 

 

Frugal innovation

I heard this term used this morning in an interview broadcast on the BBC from the Hay Festival. My first thought was that is exactly what TeachVac has been trying to achieve. The best solution at the lowest price. Next week marks a key point in the 2018 recruitment cycle for schools. Serving teachers must have resigned by the 31st May, in most schools, if they are to leave at the summer and either retire or take up another position. Some may also opt to change to part-time working.

By the end of next week schools will know the shape and size of the challenge facing their staffing arrangements for September. Most will either be fully staffed or perhaps have a last minute vacancy because of the promotion of an existing colleague. A few schools will be facing real challenges in completing their staffing and may be looking to either change the curriculum or find the best fitting person still available in the market.

At TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk we have provided a free service to schools and teachers for the past four years and alerted thousands of teachers to possible job opportunities. All this has cost nothing to anyone.

Since 2016, the DfE has been engaged in a process of establishing a similar service and the £984,000 contract was awarded in February to digital specialists DXW according to a recent article in SchoolsWeek. This sum is far in excess of the total operating costs of TeachVac since its inception. I don’t regard the DfE’s efforts as a frugal innovation even to meet government IT standards.

There has been changes across the recruitment market in the past two years. The TES has launched a subscription service and from next month SchoolsWeek will revise its recruitment advertising rates and stop its print version https://schoolsweek.co.uk/schools-week-is-changing-were-going-digital-first/ Along with other players such as eteach and The Guardian, as well as many local authorities, these services all charge schools for advertising vacancies.

TeachVac is free and up and running successfully. The DfE site doesn’t appear to have made it into BETA testing before the end of the key 2018 recruitment cycle. Ministers really do need to ask whether they are creating a value for money service and whether a joint arrangement between interested parties from across the education scene might create a better and cheaper option that could be operational nationally from September.

Next week TeachVac will be looking to identify the schools with the most vacancies so far in 2018 and comparing them with their profile on free school meals and attendance measures. I was asked about this at the recent APPG on the teaching profession, held last Monday at Westminster. The DfE won’t be able to answer this question before 2020 at the current rate of progress, whereas TeachVac can do so now. TeachVac can also identify the requirements of schools advertising vacancies in composite subjects such as modern languages – is German dying out as a language being studied – and how bad is the crisis in physics – do schools ever mention the word in their adverts for science teachers? TeachVac has already alerted schools to teacher shortages in various subjects and expects to publish more alerts next week.

 

 

 

Job listings for teachers

There was an interesting meeting/workshop at the DfE yesterday. The focus was on their embryonic (and expensive to produce) ‘job listing service’, to use its current working title. There were more DfE representatives in the room – were they being paid London salaries – than the whole workforce of TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk that is located on the Isle of Wight. This is surely the sort of project that could have been outsourced to an area of high unemployment to boost a local economy, maybe it is and I am doing the DfE an injustice?

Anyway, private BETA testing is now taking place in part of Cambridgeshire and the North East of England. The aims include providing better data for the DfE. They won’t have any for this recruitment round, so they might like to view this post https://wordpress.com/post/johnohowson.wordpress.com/2542 where I commented on the situation in London.

Those of us attending the event were told not to take photographs of the slides of the entry screens to be used by schools to log jobs. However, anyone that wants to see what the system might look like has only to log on to https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/job-profiles/secondary-school-teacher to have some sort of idea of what the site might look like, as the DfE team are using the gov.uk standards and templates from ‘scheme.org’.

In her introduction, the deputy director at the DfE responsible for this work area said the goals included:

  • reducing the time and cost to schools – TeachVac does both of these already and
  • making finding jobs easier – but no evidence was provided as to what was wrong with current job boards and other means of finding vacancies for teaching posts.

However, the Deputy Director did say that job seekers had told them that poor quality listings make finding jobs difficult. I challenged her to publish the evidence on this point, as TeachVac welcomes feedback and the team in Newport want to know if the DfE has evidence from users about TeachVac. Sadly, I didn’t receive an answer to the direct question.

There is a hunger out there for a vacancy listing service from schools and I believe TeachVac offers the best free national vacancy service currently in operation. TeachVac hasn’t required a penny of public money. If you agree there is a need, go to https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/214287 and add your name to the petition. But also go to www.teachvac.co.uk and register as a teacher and make a free search. Then ask yourself what more do I need to know when looking for a teaching post? Let the team know your thoughts.

TeachVac may not look like a wonderful up to the minute site, but it works and you only see the front end screen when you register or change your preferences, so all the investment goes on making the system work for you.

TeachVac is a closed system – you cannot view all the jobs on offer and that is deliberate. No agency can download all the jobs. The risk of the DfE’s ‘open’ system is it provides an incentive for commercial companies to capture applicants – especially new entrants from training – and sell them to schools for a finders’ fee.

An outcome where the DfE destroyed the present market, only to create new commercial opportunities in the recruitment market at even greater cost to schools than the present system would not be a sensible or desirable outcome. But, it is a risk of the present approach using an ‘open’ system.

Is the DfE work value for public money/ That’s for others to judge, but if you haven’t tried TeachVac yet, www.teachvac.co.uk then please do so before making up your mind.