# 1 Telling the story of ‘a day in the life’ of your school can help with recruitment
Participants have been focusing on ways to attract, select and induct staff to their schools as part of their second task on recruitment.
In terms of content, from January to April, we focus on two things (and two things only - we have a principle of less is more).
The first of those things is recruitment. Our rationale for giving time to this is partly that it is impossible to ignore the clamour of voices bemoaning the state of recruitment in education, and quite right too; the stats aren’t good. And obviously those who lose out the most from high staff turnover, and multiple cover lessons a week are children already experiencing complex and overlapping challenges in their lives.
So getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats, all heading in the same direction is a vitally important part of a headteacher’s role.
But how much time do school leaders allow themselves to invest in getting the right people, in the right seats on the bus?
Who hasn’t seen the bland, copy-paste job advert that could be about any school in the country?
Who hasn’t been involved in a day that was either cold and clinical or bore zero resemblance to what doing the actual job really might be like?
Who hasn’t started a job and been ‘thrown in at the deep end’ with the apologetic shrug of ‘real baptism of fire for you eh?’
And we wonder why folks don’t stick around.
This is not about judging or shaming leaders who haven’t thought deeply about this process.
But we do invite our participants to consider how that storytelling might be a great way to ensure you attract, select and induct the right people to your organisation.
Hence, our musical inspiration for this post being The Beatles track ‘A day in the life’. Argue at your leisure about whether this is their finest song, but no-one can deny the clarity of narrative in McCartney’s middle eight here. That the lyrics of the middle eight include the line ‘made the bus’ is just the icing on the cake.
What if school leaders were better at articulating these three parts to the story of recruitment?
My excellent colleague Sam Fitzpatrick has designed a set of resources for our participants challenging them to think deeply about;
how we attract the very best people to work in our schools;
how we design a rigorous and relational process to select the right people;
how we induct our new colleagues in a way that sets them up for sustainable success.
Cohort 2 did not disappoint in their presentations. Some took a wide look at all three sections. Others honed in on one phase.
Some particular highlights included Dan Machin’s video to advertise his school, Fountaindale, part of Nexus Multi Academy Trust. As he stated in his presentation, this was a way of communicating to a wide range of people, from both the education and care sector, what a day in the life might be like for a member of staff at his school.
Rizwana Saleem, of Eastwood Community school, part of NSAT, introduced a new task to the interview day; she identified a real challenge the pastoral team are tackling right now (parents not wanting their child to attend a residential visit) and created a task that would assess candidates’ ability to handle that situation.
Lucie Garrod and Rachel Seddon, at different primary schools in Hull but both part of Thrive Co-Operative Learning Trust decided to tackle the induction phase. They created a booklet to welcome new members of staff. This meant all of the necessary information can be shared in an accessible way, ahead of colleagues starting in school, and in a way that new colleagues can refer back to so as to not experience overwhelm.
Finally, Rose Avery, at Harrogate High School (also NSAT), decided to turn the school’s policy for colleagues returning from parental leave into a ‘reinduction road map’.
All the above initiatives are at early stages of implementation, but signs of impact from staff voice are positive. Watch this space for more, but in the meantime, here is our collective wisdom;
** As a side, but important note, it is worth saying that in the last two years in Yorkshire we have been working with some aspiring headteachers in Yorkshire who are more likely to be making redundancies than hires, so we proceeded with sensitivity to that fact. Some colleagues either reviewed the processes they would use in a hypothetical scenario, others reviewed processes they themselves had been part of. This was all useful learning for the group too!
If you ever want to find out more about the programme, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!