Education Business

2010 is set to be another difficult year for all recruiters. Whilst those in the education sector have ridden out the storm better than most so far, the impending squeeze on school budgets as the government seeks to reduce the national budget deficit is set to challenge the sector even further. While some will search for ‘innovative’ ways to plug the gap in the public finances, it is often the simple truths applied effectively which end up being the right solution.
    
According to the latest figures from the Report on Jobs, a monthly tracking survey produced by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), the economy is starting to recover. The job market continues to grow from a low in August 2009 to levels now comparable to 2007 before the start of the current recession. The REC’s Annual Industry Survey 2007/2008 also states that there are, in any given week, 132,000 workers supplied into the education sector.

Flexible labour
With growth now being recorded in once troubled industries such as the financial services, businesses are turning to recruiters to fill vacant positions left hanging during the recruitment freeze. Now is the time for the education sector to recognise flexible labour as the best way to cope with tight school budgets, rather than a cost to be cut.  
    
In recent years, increasing numbers of schools have naively overstaffed with unqualified teaching assistants, sometimes known as cover supervisors, as a means of providing sickness absence and other cover. The budget cuts must force school heads and managers to reconsider this mismanagement of labour resources.
    
Firstly, supply teachers through education recruiters are only a cost to the public purse when used, unlike cover supervisors who are a fixed cost on the school accounts all year round. What is more, cover supervisors themselves can be absent through sickness. Secondly, education recruiters will provide cover with supply teachers who are fully qualified, unlike the unqualified cover supervisors who can only offer a second-rate teaching experience for children. On both efficiency and quality grounds, education recruiters have a very positive message for schools facing funding cuts. As this message becomes understood more widely, the immediate future will hold opportunities for supply teaching agencies for the education sector rather than threats.
    
Education is an essential sector. By getting education right, we can equip tomorrow’s workforce with the right skills and attitudes needed for a strong economy. Ensuring that only fully qualified teachers are at the front of the classroom is more essential than ever, and supply teachers from specialist education recruiters are the most cost-effective means of achieving this.

The safety agenda
Quite apart from the efficiency and quality case for supply teachers, the child safety case is unquestionably worth making too. Checks on teachers made by recruiters include the Vetting and Barring Scheme, checks against the General Teaching Council’s register, reference checks with past employers, health checks, face to face interviews, Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) checks, overseas police checks and a myriad of others to ensure a teacher is safe to place in a school. Education recruiters do not take this job lightly and all REC Education members are kept up to date on the latest requirements they have to fulfil and the latest guidance from the Independent Safeguarding Authority.
    
The new Vetting and Barring Scheme launched by the Independent Safeguarding Authority’s (ISA) has been set up to further improve checks on people working with vulnerable adults and children. The scheme was launched in October 2009 but certain elements will not come into operation until July 2010. The most significant change in July will be the introduction of a new online registration, where teachers will have to register to work with children. The scheme will include an enhanced CRB check and cost each supply teacher £64 to complete.
    
The fact that the new Vetting and Barring Scheme will not be as all-embracing as many people think continues to be a major frustration to schools, supply teachers and their agencies alike.  
    
The new scheme only covers child safety related offences and recruiters will still need to make an additional CRB check on all new candidates to uncover any criminal offences such as drugs, theft and even some firearms offences, which would render a candidate unsuitable to teach. All this will add cost to the education sector at a time when it can least afford it. The ISA must, at some point, consider making the Vetting and Barring Scheme more thorough than the current proposal.
    
There has been huge media interest in terms of how the new scheme will be implemented and the REC has been working behind the scenes to take forward the views of recruitment professionals who will be on the front line of using the scheme.

The need for guidance
Yet with six months to go questions still linger on aspects of the Vetting & Barring Scheme and after months of promises from the government, guidance for recruiters is yet to be published.
    
Under the new scheme it will become compulsory for all new recruits to be registered before they undertake ‘regulated activity’ from November 2010. In April 2009 there was a change to the phasing-in of the ISA regulation. This change meant that recruiters would have no way of checking if a supply teacher was barred to work with children until a CRB check was approved, a process which sometimes took months. Given the nature of supply teaching, the ability to quickly check the suitability of temporary staff is essential and the Recruitment & Employment Confederation is working with the ISA and specialist select committees on the Vetting & Barring Scheme to ensure that this is recognised and that other essential checks remain workable in the run up to the registration switchover in July.
    
The months before then will prove extremely busy as schools prepare for the new school term in September. It is essential that recruiters and schools have sufficient time to take stock of the new changes and train staff and key personnel within schools on what the new regulations require. Most importantly, the government must learn from the mistakes it made when the CRB scheme was originally introduced when many schools found it difficult to source staff because the system was overloaded.
    
If this scheme is to be successful then businesses and organisations need sufficient time to prepare to ensure that it doesn’t create any an unnecessary shortage of staff.
    
Given the complexity of candidate checks and meeting ISA regulation, it makes economic sense for specialist agencies who work across local authority boundaries to handle the recruitment needs of schools, rather than the countries 27,000 schools to handle their own recruitment needs individually. This will ensure that staff are quickly sourced, thoroughly vetted and are thoroughly qualified to provide a valuable service to the nation’s schools.
    
As we recover from the recession, it will be more important than ever to ensure that we provide children with the best education experience that we can today, in order to give the workforce of tomorrow the best possible start.