Is flexible working in schools necessary for recruitment and retention?

It’s really important that we take flexible working in the education sector seriously. We need to accept that for graduates coming into the profession, teaching and working in education is less attractive than it used to be. Comparably, other sectors are able to offer far more flexibility and agility. School recruitment to both primary and secondary hasn’t hit targets this year, and didn’t hit targets last year. We’re in a continual churn of not having enough people entering the profession and far too many leaving. 

So I’m always in favour of looking at how this can work. How do we ensure that we give that flexibility to our colleagues without decreasing the experience of our young people and therefore going against our core mission? That’s an issue to solve rather than a problem to be had.

You’ll often hear the timetabler say that flexible working is difficult. The answer to that is, yes, it is. However, it’s still worth the time and investment. And the phrase I use quite often on this is ‘the tail can’t wag the dog’. The timetable is there to efficiently enact your teaching curriculum model and your expectations. They can’t come at the cost of the flexibility we must put in place.

 

Why is flexible working important for teachers?

Flexibility is particularly important for female colleagues in this space, to ensure that their lives aren’t a choice between parenthood and career. It isn’t an expectation that if you’re not in for all five days, your contribution is valued less. In an increasingly agile workforce across all sectors, if we try to maintain some of the paradigms we’ve always had on this, then that’s where we make it a less attractive proposition. And so if we know that female colleagues in their thirties in particular are the most likely to leave a profession, then this tells us something about our approach as a profession. 

Furthermore, our responsibility is to ensure that if someone does take advantage of flexible working, that if they are working three days, they work three days. We’ve got to be really conscious of when we put our meeting times. What are the opportunities to contribute to communication in a way that doesn’t disenfranchise? What I don’t want to do is create a circumstance in which any colleague feels like they’re not doing anything to their best and it becomes an overwhelm. There’s some cultural aspects that are wider than any school or trust, frankly, that we need to be thinking about.

 

How do we make flexible working succeed in the timetable?

We’ve been training our timetablers in order to get more flexible. In fact, when we brought Arbor into the trust, that was one of the core aspects that I asked for. How can we be supported to make sure that actually, this isn’t a new timetable system, this is a new timetable approach? Even in language, we’ve adapted how we’re talking. Often a timetabler will talk about flexible staff as a constraint. And the reason it’s a constraint is because, well, they want to work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, which means? Which means? Which means it’s not a constraint, it’s a condition, and therefore it’s a condition and expectation of employment. So it doesn’t constrain the timetable, it merely gives some parameters in which we need to meet those conditions without taking away from a balance for our young people to experience. You don’t want a child to have five periods of Maths in one day, for example. However, that really rarely happens.  

I say this as a timetabler myself, we can be a tad precious in this space and we almost treat it as if it is an aspect removed from the humans actually involved in it. A timetable is an organisation of human labour and endeavour. It isn’t just a set of pretty colours with some initials on it, which therefore takes us away from what we’re trying to achieve. What we’re trying to achieve is delivering a balanced and rich curriculum that meets the needs of the adults delivering it. And that second part is a really critical aspect of how we reframe discussion.

 

Flexible working pinchpoints

Of course, flexible working isn’t without its pinchpoints. One classic example is that in one of the secondaries on Fridays, there are significantly less adults in the building. That provides a challenge to us as leaders to solve. That shouldn’t be the responsibility of our colleagues who are making really valid requests. It’s about being more flexible about how we treat that day. In particular, what do we do in terms of looking at the senior leader timetables, what do we do at looking at our support staff and their ability to support more broadly? How do we look at duties? How do we look at other aspects of an ecosystem that ensure that we don’t take away?

Many of our staff who are on a 0.8 fraction will tend to go for a Friday or a Monday as the day they’re off, because it gives them a greater ability to basically do what they wish to do. One school of thought is: that’s really difficult because that means I’ve barely got anyone in on a Friday. Another school of thought is: I’ve got a really exceptional teacher for four days of a week and I have an issue to process and I have an issue to solve. I’m not going to make it their issue. There can be a bit of guilting or emotional blackmail in this space for female colleagues in particular. And since there’s already that really strong sense of responsibility versus balance, I just think that it’s not just inappropriate. It goes against wellbeing and it goes against what we should be trying to achieve for all of our staff, which is that they can be their best selves and do their best work.

Secondly, there is something to be said for how we can put some flexibility into the days that staff have. So, for example, for those where it’s not about flexible working, that is being on a 0.8, 0.6 or a different FTE, because I have looked at this, it could be really quite easy to rotate so that in one half term you do get the Friday, the next half term you get a Wednesday. There’s space for agility there. 

 

Innovating thinking around the timetable

In our primary schools, our young people have a very agile and flexible experience of when curriculum is delivered. Suddenly in secondary, you set a timetable for September and then schools are fairly set in this belief that it can’t change or move, because it would be too complicated. That’s utter nonsense. It’s just the way it’s always been. 

At Dartmoor, we’re starting to see timetabling as a group endeavour. So instead of it being one person sitting in a room in the dark, getting headaches, trying to make it all work, it’s actually six to eight people sitting around a table, collectively solving, challenging each other and starting to think, well, could this work? How could it work? What will this look like in practice? Timetabling really is the biggest aspect that will affect the lived experience of our children and our adults. It’s therefore the most important proceduralisation of strategy we have.

In any school, we don’t ever allow single points of failure where one person is responsible for just one really specific aspect. And yet, when it comes to timetable, we do. We talk about the timetabler. Well, how about the Timetable Team? One of the things we’ve done around timetabling is put in a playbook. The first thing it starts with is, what are our cultural norms? What are we trying to achieve? It’s really important that middle leaders and senior leaders and class teachers and support staff are really involved in the process of timetable. That way, we don’t get to a point where we just say, here’s the timetable and that’s that. 

 

Championing flexible working in education

In sum, flexible working in schools is not something that we can, or should, shy away from. In fact, there’s no reason whatsoever that we as a sector can’t lead the way in this. We are one of the most female dominated professions there is. We should be the ones holding up a way of doing this which is perhaps more innovative, more inclusive and more radical, dare I say, than we have in the past.