Compliance with the statutory provisions

Meeting statutory requirements 63.7%
Not meeting statutory requirements 27.7%
Donʼt know 8.6%

School Policies and Systems

All schools are required to have in place an agreed policy and robust system for ensuring that teachers and the headteacher cover only rarely and only in circumstances that are not foreseeable.

However, in over one third of cases, respondents were unable to confirm that their schools had a robust system in place to ensure that the new statutory requirements were being met, 26.2% of respondents said that their school did not have a robust system in place for managing rarely cover and a further 15% of respondents were not able to confirm that their school had any system in place. Over half of all primary school respondents (51%) said that their school either did not have a robust system in place or were unable to confirm what that system was.

Consultation with Staff and Unions

In establishing robust and compliant systems for managing rarely cover, all schools are required to consult with their staff and with trade unions. The survey asked teachers and headteachers about their experiences of consultation.

Respondents were less likely to indicate that they had been consulted as opposed to having not been consulted on the their schoolʼs rarely cover policy and system. Only two fifths (40.3%) of the respondents said that they had been consulted on the schoolʼs rarely cover policy and systems, whilst around half (47.8%) of the respondents said that they had not been consulted on the schoolʼs rarely cover policy and systems.

The experience was far worse for primary school respondents, where a miserly one in five teachers confirmed that they had been consulted by their schools.

To understand teachersʼ experiences of consultation on the introduction of school level rarely cover policies and systems, the survey asked respondents about the quality of the consultation. Schools are required to consult with staff and unions on their rarely cover policy, systems and procedures.

Around two thirds of respondents (59.4%) said that there had been no meaningful or genuine consultation by their school prior to the introduction of a rarely cover policy or system. The position was worse in primary schools, where only 15% of respondents confirmed there had been any genuine and meaningful consultation with staff on rarely cover.

The experience of consultation with trade unions was similar to that of consultation with staff, albeit slightly worse: only one quarter (25.2%) of respondents confirmed that their schools had consulted fully with the trade unions on the schoolʼs rarely cover policy and systems. Around one third of respondents did not know if consultation had taken place with the workforce unions.

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