BESA CORNER
This month in our ongoing feature highlighting the work of members of the UK education suppliers’ trade body BESA, we hear from ACCESS EDUCATION and BLUESKY
nurture a thriving workforce When headteacher Bernard Cassidy joined St George’s Primary School, Merseyside, there had been a significant turnover of staff, which was affecting the school’s ability to provide a high standard of education.
Bernard explains: “Staffing was a critical issue; 70 percent of the curriculum staff had left
in the preceding 18 months. That of course had led to a lack of joined- up leadership, and had impacted the quality of teaching and pastoral care.”
St George’s is a large Primary school with over 900 children enrolled, around 160 staff in total, including up to 90 curriculum staff. He adds: “We knew that we needed to get a handle on developing our staff. We needed a tool that would help us implement a new approach to staff development, in a way which was informed and effective.” Entitlement to targeted CPD
All school staff are entitled to a minimum number of hours of CPD, which Bernard believes is essential to supporting individuals to do their jobs: “If you’re not giving staff entitlement to high quality training, and checking that that’s being done, you’re just setting those people up to fail.
The BlueSky Education platform is used to support the professional development process for all school staff. “The whole point of having a record of CPD is that we want our staff to thrive. We don’t want training to be accidental. BlueSky allows us to analyse whether the training they’re accessing is relevant to their current role and their aspirations for the future.”
Transparent and open appraisal conversations Bernard highlights the importance of documenting all conversions around staff development and performance: “If I write feedback on someone on BlueSky, they can see that and have the right to reply. If I write your objective and you disagree, then that’s noted. If there’s a lesson review or a work routine, we have clear evaluation criteria and the space for the member of staff to respond to that in BlueSky. “I want all my staff to be thriving, I want them to be enjoying their work and performing as well as they can. We want to be celebrating their development and achievements, but at the same time, if staff are struggling, I want that same fairness and transparency so we can support them.”
Supporting school priorities
BlueSky is instrumental in helping Bernard and his team identify training needs and defining the professional learning strategy for staff in different roles.
Bernard explains: “It helps us to identify training needs for individuals, but also across teams. With Bluesky, I can quickly run a report on what the team’s training offer looks like, where we’re up to with reviews and evaluations, and even the status of mandatory training. It gives you that informed picture of what is going on straight away. “In terms of being able to properly analyse and share an evaluation of your whole staff workforce with external stakeholders, whether that’s Ofsted or Governors, BlueSky is an incredibly powerful tool. The school’s strategic priorities are embedded in BlueSky, so we are able to use these as KPIs and demonstrate that 95% of staff professional development was directly linked to the school’s four main aims. You couldn’t do that otherwise. It’s really helped us to achieve our ambitions for a thriving workforce.”
To learn more about BlueSky’s online solution for appraisal and workforce development, visit
https://blueskyeducation.co.uk/
16
www.education-today.co.uk
How an online platform helped turn around staff retention and
The meaningful steps schools can take to put teacher wellbeing first
Comment by EMMA SLATER, Head of Education at Access Education
In recent years, there have been countless headlines about the issues facing today’s school staff, with stress, pay, and dealing with poor student behaviour cropping up as recurring problems. While the new Labour government has confirmed that teachers and education leaders will receive a 5.5 percent pay rise, there is a consensus within the sector that further action is needed to remedy the key issues affecting teachers’ wellbeing.
Indeed, teacher wellbeing is recognised to have declined significantly, with Education Support’s 2023 Teacher Wellbeing Index finding that 78 percent of all education staff are stressed, while over half (51 per cent) experience insomnia or difficulty sleeping.
In turn, this has naturally affected teachers’ ability to do their jobs, demonstrated by the fact that the percentage of teachers taking sickness absence in the UK has only continued to increase - rising to 66 percent in the last year.
To provide further insight, Access Education recently published the ‘Big Sick Leave Report’. The report analyses the top reasons why staff have requested a sick day, highlighting the issues at hand, and suggesting how schools can better support their staff. Two worrying trends
Using data from Access PeopleHR, the report shows that from 2019 to 2022, 16,747 sick days were taken across the Education sector. This represents a 31.7 per cent increase in sick days - from 3,640 days in 2019, to 4,794 in 2022.
While many may assume this increase aligns with the rise in COVID-19 infections during the pandemic, it was ‘mental health or related’ reasons that emerged as the leading cause, with 3,566 absences accounting for 21.2 per cent of total sick days. Increased workloads, adapting to different needs of students, and pressure to meet new targets, have all likely contributed to educators feeling overwhelmed.
The data also highlighted that ‘reason not given’, ‘other’, and ‘not listed’ collectively represented 4.5 per cent of all reported sick days - a drastic increase of 2,325 per cent from 2019 to 2022. Despite the fact younger generations are becoming more open about their wellbeing and mental health, this could suggest that staff don’t feel comfortable sharing the actual reason they can’t attend work - simply underscoring the need to put appropriate systems in place. Making a difference
Ensuring confidentiality and encouraging honesty are two of the key elements which can help staff feel comfortable enough to share the exact reasons they require time off.
Accurately reporting why staff are taking sick leave, through systems such as Access Education People HR software, is key to understanding what assistance they may require. While a physical ailment may feel easier to report, highlighting any well-being issues is just as important and validated.
It’s important to give staff the flexibility here, whether they’d prefer to chat through how they’re feeling with their line manager on the day, or submit their request through one click and discuss the details after. We’ve seen time and time again that different initiatives suit different individuals, with some benefiting from physical health initiatives such as yoga, while others prefer gestures of appreciation and recognition. These can help enhance wellbeing, but of course need to go hand- in-hand with nationwide action to address the root causes of the issues. Understanding these requires a combination of data and listening to teachers’ first-hand experience.
In a time where teacher recruitment and retention rates continue to dwindle - with this year’s NFER labour market report confirming the recruitment and retention crisis showed ‘no signs of abating’ - there is no excuse to not put teacher’s health and happiness first, for the benefit of students and staff alike.
For more information visit:
https://www.theaccessgroup.com/en-gb/ education/
October 2024
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