FEATURE FOCUS: RECRUITMENT & RETENTION


staff – particularly when it comes to tackling the challenges that the sector faces. It’s no surprise that wellbeing, workloads and recruitment are all factors that need to be addressed – with the 2023 Teacher Wellbeing Index citing 78 per cent of staff are stressed, and 55 per cent consider their organisation’s culture negatively effects their wellbeing.


However, to address this, we need to consider a more holistic viewpoint. Through servant- leadership, we can remove the barriers that inevitably get in the way and create a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in the everyday. By prioritising the needs of the team, we’re able to foster genuine relationships, resulting in people becoming wiser, healthier, happier and more autonomous and willing to perform well. The result? Achieving our wider mission of meeting our learners’ needs and creating a place where everyone can flourish.


Seeing the impact change


and preparing pupils to contribute positively within their communities.


A commitment to change


Making the decision to put our people first was not one that was easily said and done; it is an ongoing and evolving journey. Delivering effective support for our people requires full commitment to creating an intentional strategic shift to change culture across all levels. A cultural shift is what is needed to make a real difference to the wellbeing and motivations of all our people – and bring our ‘magic formula’ to life.


We understood at West Lea that if we wanted to create an environment in which our people flourish, it would require a significant, but necessary, investment of time, effort and resources. This type of change cannot be done via ‘band-aid’ policies or quick fixes. Cultural change takes courage, ambition, supportive leadership, conviction and a long-term commitment. You must enter into this process with the full understanding it won’t happen overnight and that there will always be more improvements and progress to be made along the way. A common barrier in improving wellbeing for many schools is capacity, and more specifically whether schools engage with external partners. Most schools have a traditional HR capacity that generally focuses on operations and administrative duties. However, to overhaul and instigate a meaningful and sustained cultural shift, you need to create capacity to prioritise making people and culture a strategic objective. Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) should, more often than not, be able to drive change in this way using the central teams due to the efficiencies and additional capacity created by the MAT structure. For individual schools or smaller Trusts, it is sometimes not possible to spark this change without external support and expertise. This is why at West Lea we draw on the engagement science of Gallup and work closely with expert cultural change advisers.


Putting it into practice


To create and implement an effective strategy that empowers our people and culture, we


March 2024


looked to Gallup’s engagement science which considers 12 different employee needs to understand how we can empower our people and guide our journey to support our shared vision.


We started by measuring our baseline using a Gallup report to understand where our strengths and weaknesses lay, and how we could forge a path towards progress. From here we created an employee engagement strategy which centred on investing in our leaders and people managers. Gallup’s decades of research has shown that people typically don’t leave their organisation they leave their managers; 70 per cent of someone’s engagement is directly attributable to factors in the control of the people manager. Therefore, it was important to help our people managers at all levels understand what it means to flourish and the important role they play in supporting others. After emphasising the school’s vision mission and values to our teams, we created an ongoing leadership programme focused on our ‘servant-leadership’. We began by helping them understand what it means to be a West Lea leader – it’s not just what you do, but how you do it, encouraging them to lead by example by living our culture and values every day. In this way, our leaders and people managers are creating a culture where they empower and support their direct reports rather than simply holding them to account against, what can often be, a set of abstract objectives. This approach encourages leaders to share responsibility and inspire talent among their teams to help them become the very best they can be. It’s about working together to increase confidence, capability, and ownership. For example, rather than focusing on performance metrics, we motivate our people to think about what they want to achieve in the realms of their career development and how we can help them get there. We have termed the phrase ‘Partnering for Performance’ to replace performance management because for us, successful development is achieved through a partnership between people managers and their people. Education is a mission driven sector which plays a pivotal role in motivating and inspiring


Our work is by no means done, but we are beginning to see the impact as we continue to work to embed this approach. In 2023, we completed a second Gallup report to measure the impact of our work so far. Despite it only being a year since we had begun to prioritise culture and people, our most recent report showed that employee engagement levels have increased by 7 per cent from 2022; figures that remain far beyond national and sector averages. We are fully aware that despite the promising progress we have seen so far, we have only taken the first few steps on our journey to creating an empowering and rewarding culture for our people. This is a journey that we will continue to travel on. Ensuring your people can succeed is not a destination, but something that must always be actively strived for. Whilst this can seem daunting to some schools, it is a challenge that must be welcomed. People are fundamental to the success of any organisation and supporting them to be their very best should be the ambition – and duty - of every employer, regardless of sector. This is why at West Lea we try to live our values and are continuing to strive to create a supportive, people focused environment which makes our ‘Magic formula’ of flourishing people = flourishing pupils = flourishing communities a reality.


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