“Teachers offered lie-ins and three-day weekends in efforts to combat retention crisis.”
So screamed one headline after the new government floated its plans to allow teachers to take some of their planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time at home.
This kind of press coverage created a spectacular smokescreen of misunderstanding about flexible working – the key word there being “working”.
On the same day as the Guardian published the “lie-ins” headline, Teach First was publishing a report entitled Tomorrow’s teachers: A roadmap for attracting Gen Z.
In a poll of 3,031 young people, they found a significant number who had an interest in the teaching profession – 73% said that teaching was a job that had purpose, 61% of Gen Z would consider working as a teacher, and 47% said they would enjoy teaching for a few years but not their whole career. Something is sounding very positive here.
Within the report, a section called “a roadmap for teacher recruitment”, offers a range of ideas from increasing pay or using bursaries, to workload reduction and teacher in residence secondments.
And alongside this, we find a section on flexible working. Specifically, on page 55: “The government should set out a flexibility entitlement for every teacher. This should build on the DfE’s flexible working toolkit to establish a flexible working offer for school workforces.”
What a mess – the positivity of Gen Z towards the teaching profession, some great practical proposals to enhance recruitment, but the media boil all of that down to “lie-ins” and “days off”.
What is flexible working?
Flexible working refers to a range of practices that allow you to have greater control over how much, when and where you work.
Over the last 12 months, I have been working with the Department for Education (DfE) on the Flexile Working Ambassador Multi-Academy Trusts and Schools (FWAMS) initiative to support school leaders to implement flexible working in their schools.
Working with participant schools and MATs, my colleague Julie Wellacott and I have delivered workshops and webinars and spoken at conferences.
One thing that has struck me is how much of the time we fall into talking about one thing – part-time working. But there are so many other flexible working options out there.
There is a great need to better understand flexible working – both in the media, but also in some schools. So in this piece I’d like to describe five types of flexible working for teachers.
1, Full-time flex
This covers teachers who may take PPA off-site and/or work for nine-day fortnights.
It felt like there was a shift over the summer when the education secretary announced in a Parliamentary statement (2024) that: “We will clarify the position on PPA time, so schools are clear that teachers can use this time at home to provide greater flexibility for teachers.”
As a flexible working ambassador, this year we trialled the option for staff to work PPA off-site. We have been cautious, doing this by request so that we ensure we have sufficient staff in the building at any one time. Interestingly, just over half requested to do this.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) alongside researchers from the UCL Institute of Education and the Chartered College of Teaching have launched a research project called School Choices which will consider the impact of off-site PPA on teacher retention.
Early finishes and nine-day fortnight are further forms of full-time flex. Further research has been commissioned by the EEF on this, led by Ambition Institute, which will focus on whether a nine-day working fortnight can improve teacher retention. This project is working with Dixons Academies Trust, which moved to a nine-day working fortnight at the start of this school year across its 17 schools.
2, Phased retirement and job shares
I recently co-authored an article in SecEd with Mike Roper, a teacher for 34 years and a headteacher for 14. Currently, in his second headship, leading a large inner city (11 to 18) secondary school, he started to flex by working a four-day week for one year before moving to a three-day week. His deputy headteacher steps up on the days when Mike isn’t working.
Mike’s approach is a purposeful strategy, helping develop future leaders in his school, promoting his wellbeing, and retaining his expertise for just that little bit longer.
3, Remote training
This involves harnessing technology and getting creative with training days so that teachers have the option to work remotely – remember flexible working is about when and where you work. The training needs to be done, but the when and where is in your control.
4, Trading to flex
Picture a teacher, an exceptional teacher of 20 years, who achieves the highest outcomes for the school; there is no gap in her results for any group and she has never had a day off. She then asks for one. She loves tennis and wants, just once, to go to Wimbledon. Should a headteacher allow this?
One of the participant schools in our FWAMS found a creative way around this where teachers supported one another to flex: the teacher offers to cover, in her subject area, the same number of lessons that she would miss for the day and there were enough colleagues in her team offering the same. There was no lost learning, lessons were taught by subject specialists, and she took the day.
5, Part-time work
In 2016, 25 of our teachers were formally working flexibly. Now that figure stands at 50 out of 115 teachers.
Simply put, some teachers are working fewer hours than the standard full-time schedule. This seems to have been beneficial for teachers who have other commitments, such as studying, caring for family members, or pursuing other interests.
The language seems to be changing in this area. FWAMS colleagues talk about fractional working, not part-time working, shared classes and not split classes.
I am also hearing a lot of debate about whether TLR payments should be pro-rata for those working part-time, supported by Bridget Phillipson’s recent letter to the School Teachers’ Review Body (DfE, 2024).
Why is this important now?
These five examples illustrate some forms of flexible working, to meet the varying needs of teachers and schools. Each arrangement has its own benefits and challenges and the list is not exhaustive.
While we are discussing teacher “lie-ins”, the number of teachers leaving the profession is simply sobering. As SecEd has reported, we have lost around 80,000 teachers in the last two years.
A recent report, however, from the National Foundation for Educational Research (Harland et al, 2023) discovered something that I have seen paying off in our school – and something that gives a great deal of hope for the future.
The review concludes that flexible working practices “appear to play an important role in improving teacher recruitment and retention” and that “offering flexibility is associated with several positive teacher outcomes”.
The research found “considerable perceptual evidence that flexible working can support recruitment, retention, and workforce stability”, contributing – wait for it – positively to things like staff wellbeing, job satisfaction, attendance, productivity, motivation, capacity, expertise, diversity, career progression, succession planning, and reducing the gender pay gap (SecEd’s report on this research can be found here).
While there seems to be a lot of “perceptual evidence”, there is a lack of hard evidence of causal impact. This warrants further investigation and hopefully the EEF research projects will help to fill this gap.
It's more complicated than staying in bed
Exploring flexible working in schools might just be one thing that school and system leaders can do to create a sustainable, supportive, and effective educational environment that benefits both teachers and students. And that is something that gets me out of bed in the morning.
- Neil Renton is headteacher of Harrogate Grammar School in North Yorkshire, a large comprehensive secondary school of more than 2,100 students and part of the Red Kite Learning Trust. He is the author of the recently published New School Leader: What now? Find his previous SecEd articles and podcast appearances via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/neil-renton
Further information & resources
- DfE: Correspondence from Bridget Phillipson MP to chair of the STRB, 2024: https://buff.ly/3U45knO
- Flexible Working Ambassador Multi-Academy Trusts and Schools: www.flexibleworkingineducation.co.uk
- Harland, Bradley & Worth: Understanding the factors that support the recruitment and retention of teachers: Review of flexible working approaches, EEF & NFER, 2023.
- SecEd Podcast: Flexible working in the secondary school, 2023: www.sec-ed.co.uk/content/podcasts/the-seced-podcast-flexible-working-in-the-secondary-school
- Teach First: Tomorrow’s teachers: A roadmap for attracting Gen Z, 2024: www.teachfirst.org.uk/tomorrows-teachers
- UK Parliament: Teachers update: Statement, July 29, 2024: https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2024-07-29/hcws35