Back to school – supply teachers and part-time workers when are you available?
Sharing availability for supply teachers and learning support assistants with preferred schools and agencies is often a painful and necessary process.
It’s difficult because there are many contacts to keep up to date with each availability change. For most part-time flexible workers there are often unforeseen changes to their schedule, perhaps extending work, finding one of the assigned days is no longer required or just need a different afternoon off to look after children.
Shifting availability is one of great benefits of flexible working, however, communicating those changes was difficult. Updatedge a free to use service makes this process easy for part-time supply staff with any agencies and contacts.
Supply Teachers and Learning Support Assistants
At the beginning of each academic year, part-time supply staff are chased unrelentingly for their accurate availability by agencies who need to know who is available for job vacancies
It’s a persistent requirement for recruiters to know who is available to match the right people with the right temporary teaching and teaching assistant jobs.
Typically, a recruiter in education spends an average of 20% of their working week chasing workers to find and record availability. That’s an average through the term – at the beginning of a new term that rises to well above 40%, 2 days of their week.
The problem is as soon as availability is recorded it to loses its value, as availability can change pretty much immediately. This necessitates recruiters having to regularly check several times during the lead up to the new school term to make sure part-time supply staff remain available.
Having three agencies representing you means lots of calls and emails each week just to establish availability leaving little time to speak about the requirements of the teaching jobs you would like.
Schools internal bank staff
The same is true for schools running their internal banks of part-time staff and volunteers. Establishing who is available for Monday, Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon is a time-consuming process with numerous emails and calls to get the schedules right.
Schools need to know which of their preferred contacts are available
Many schools in the past relied on third-parties to determine the agency staff they would get, often without choice. With digital systems providing transparency between workers and business hirers, schools now have the choice to see who is available, to offer work, select the best applicants and confirm to their agencies. There are digital services that enable this transparency including www.updatedge.com which is used by many workers, schools, and agencies.
Online browser-based services provide full transparency for schools, their internal bank staff and external agency staff.
Schools Management Information
Interestingly online services also provide schools business managers with detailed management information too, being able to see which internal bank staff have been booked and which agency staff too and this can be consolidated at an academy trust level too.
For all those part-time staff and agency workers getting their pencils sharpened for the new term, using an online service to share your availability, and getting more jobs with your schools and agencies is one of those tasks that just got really easy. We recommend trying updatedge
And for schools trying to find out the availability of all their bank staff, to see their availability is no longer a problem in fact it is now straight forward.
Flexible working is here to stay
41% of the UK workforce consists of part-time workers. Flexibility is here to stay and will increase further as employers adopt more flexible working patterns. It is recognised that job shares and part-time working is highly productive for all concerned and there is little need for outdated hard and fast 9-5 traditional working practices to remain in many sectors.