Retention is the New Recruitment

In any school, the quality and dedication of staff plays a crucial role in creating a positive, happy learning environment. We all know that school staff retention is vital for maintaining continuity and promoting pupil success but retaining talented and committed staff can be challenging.

To help combat this, there are a few strategies that your school can implement. In this blog, we will explore what these are to help your school retain talent.

1. Build a positive and supportive school culture

To help create and promote a sense of belonging, you should encourage open communication, collaboration and mutual respect among staff members. This ensures all staff feel valued and appreciated for their hard work. Recognising achievements, celebrating milestones and creating opportunities for professional growth and development also go a long way.

2. Offer competitive salaries and enticing benefits

Where possible, regularly review and update salary structures to ensure your offering is competitive within the market. Benefits packages that include private healthcare, free counselling sessions, other perks such as free lunches and parking, and free use of school sports facilities or cycle to work schemes will also encourage staff to remain with you.

Oasis Community Learning are an example of how to do this effectively. As well as clearly outlining what benefits they offer their staff in the Careers section of their website, they also showcase the range of CPD programmes and modules available to all colleagues.

3. Encourage professional growth and development

Strive to create a culture of continuous learning and provide resources for professional development to maintain staff engagement. This will show your staff you are invested in their growth and long-term success with your school. Offering training programmes or creating mentoring schemes that pair more experienced staff with newer team members, are great examples of how to encourage this.

Ambleglow have recently delivered a workshop covering ‘Inclusion and Diversity in Recruitment’ and ‘LinkedIn for Schools’ to an audience of HR professionals who collaborated onsite at Haberdashers’ Boys’ School. Being experts in education recruitment, our training session gave the schools access to valuable material that is quite niche and hard to come by, which they can now take away and share with their wider teams. Following our workshop, a roundtable discussion was also held for everyone to share knowledge, experiences and ideas with their peers.

4. Establish work-life balance

Everybody wants to improve their work-life balance. The more your school can promote the importance of this, the better. Giving your staff the tools to achieve this will increase their overall job satisfaction levels. This, in turn will help you retain them and reduce your need to recruit. There are a few ways to do this, encourage staff members to prioritise self-care and provide flexible working hours options where feasible. Implement strategies to manage workload more effectively.

5. Enhance communication and collaboration

This is vital for a happy work environment. Make sure you create clear and transparent communication channels that encourage open dialogue and feedback. Encourage staff members to share ideas, concerns and suggestions for improvement. This can be achieved by holding regular team meetings. Ensure that everyone feels involved, heard and informed. For those staff members who have concerns to share but prefer to not do this in an open forum, there are tools such as TES’ Staff Pulse. An anonymous staff wellbeing survey that compiles answers in an easy-to-digest report (you’ll need to have an active TES Staff Management Subscription in place to use this though). These will highlight any potential issues and allow you to take action before they become a bigger problem.

6. Offer leadership opportunities

Providing leadership opportunities can boost morale and increase retention. One way to do this is by identifying potential leaders and getting them to head up projects, mentor colleagues or take part in decision-making processes. By nurturing their leadership skills, this not only benefits them but also the overall school community. And, not to forget, this goes some way in helping achieve a better work-life balance by spreading the workload across the team.

7. Conduct exit interviews and act on feedback

When staff members choose to leave, conducting exit interviews can provide valuable insights into areas that may need improvement. By understanding the reasons behind staff departures, you can identify trends and make necessary changes that will improve staff retention. We know that negative feedback isn’t always nice to hear but hearing it gives you the chance to act upon it and turn it into a positive.

Conclusion

It’s clear that there are many ways to try to retain staff. Some will be trial and error to see which have the biggest impact for your school – what works for one, might not work for another. As long as you keep the importance of staff retention at the forefront of your mind, and you are actively implementing strategies around this, hopefully this will alleviate the need for high levels of recruitment. Ambleglow are seeing more and more incoming requests to re-post job adverts than ever before. One possible reason for this could be a lack of emphasis on your staff retention message. We hope you have found the above tips useful and that they help you to implement a stronger retention strategy for your school.

Don’t forget, Ambleglow can support your school with staff retention initiatives. If you’d like to find out more on how we can help you with this, book a Discovery Call here.