FEATURE FOCUS: RECRUITMENT
development. For education, this requires a rethink of how roles are designed and how progression paths are framed. Pay and workload do, of course, still matter – but they’re just part of the picture. Onboarding, culture, people management and whether staff feel equipped for the modern classroom and leadership roles are all factors. There was also a strong sense that the sector doesn’t do enough to promote the positives of working in education. Purpose and the opportunity for personal growth remain powerful draws, as they did for me as a young teacher, but they are often crowded out by negative messages.
Developing from within
Sustainable workforce planning isn’t just about hiring new people – it’s about growing existing talent. And apprenticeships are a practical way of boosting retention and strengthening succession planning in a budget-conscious way.
Certainly, apprenticeships are becoming a major piece in the workforce puzzle for Peter Mayand, CEO of Albany Learning Trust in Lancashire. Peter and his team are developing a very clear and intentional use of apprenticeships to develop staff leadership and training across the workforce, using the apprenticeship levy to fund training and development across their workforce, including senior staff completing leadership NPQs and finance and HR colleagues building their professional skills.
The approach has also helped them to skill up SEND staff – and keep them in the trust, he told us. “I remember working with an absolutely brilliant teaching assistant who wanted to go into teaching, but she hadn’t got a degree and couldn’t afford to stop working in order to get a degree,” Peter said. “Sadly, she left education full stop and started a healthcare role, which was a real tragedy. Now we’re looking to upscale all our teaching assistants as well as giving some a pathway through degree apprenticeships to ultimately get into teaching.”
A new approach to supply cover The increasing use of supply cover to meet teaching gaps is a key issue for MAT leaders today. Supply teaching costs have grown rapidly in recent years – spending on agency supply teachers alone reached £1.4 billion in 2023-24, according to the DfE.
Increased supply costs alongside tightening budgets helped the team at Our Lady Help of Christians (OHOC) Trust in Shrewsbury reappraise how they managed supply cover across their 16 schools. Schools were working independently with their own suppliers, meaning there was no consolidated picture of spend, usage, or demand across the trust. The trust adopted SupplyBank to build a trust wide approach to temporary staffing. Rather than each school operating independently, there’s one partner managing and coordinating supply across the trust with a guarantee that 90% of roles will be filled.
The platform brings together all a school’s vetted agencies and manages them through one system that covers bookings, compliance, timesheets, and invoicing. The approach is designed to save recruitment costs, reduce admin, increase data and cost visibility and cut the time it takes to manage a supply agency network.
They have now shifted their focus away from operational control to a more strategic phase, moving away from reactive recruitment spend towards proactive workforce planning. And that includes working within spend budgets, using new data to drive down usage where appropriate, linking recruitment more closely with workforce development, training, and wellbeing.
We are as a sector beginning to face up to changing career expectations, but there’s still plenty to do. Retention rates are decreasing still which isn’t the fault of trust and school leadership because it is an issue facing lots of sectors.
What is more important perhaps is how we continue to bring people into the profession – and keep them there. Where are the blockages and hurdles that make it unattractive and how do we remove them? Our discussions focused on some of the strategies that could begin to make a difference, and from what I’ve heard from trust and school leaders who are embracing these fresh approaches around the country, there’s much to be optimistic and excited about.
March 2026
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