Just as no two schools are the same, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all flexible working plan. Headteachers and SLTs know their staff and understand the specific challenges of their student body, timetable, and curriculum, and so are best placed to devise a flexible working strategy and set of practices that match the needs of their school.
However, there are some key principles common to schools with high rates of flexible working, which leaders and HR teams can learn from. There are also some insights from ways of working during the Covid-19 pandemic which schools can reflect in their flexible working planning.
These principles and practices come from a range of schools; primary and secondary, LA maintained and academies.
Creating a flexible culture
At the heart of a successful flexible school is a positive, proactive leader who is driven to support their staff, and who believes that flexible working will help achieve this. Flexible working practices thrive within a flexible culture, which is one in which school leaders:
- Are clear and upfront about their support for flexible working and their belief that it allows teachers to perform at their best and benefits students as a result.
- Encourage staff who work flexibly to act as role models, sharing their stories and examples of what works with other staff.
- Create flexible working guidance and developing flexible working policies, promoting the benefits of flexible working to staff at all levels and encouraging informal conversations.
- Ensure that these policies are inclusive and thought through, supporting a variety of different flexible working options.
- Invest time and training into the timetabling and job design process so it can be done strategically, rather than settling for a request-response model.
- Understand that it will take time to get right, but that it is time worth spending, which will help keep hold of talented teachers and reduce recruitment costs.
Building a framework that supports team input
Trying to accommodate flexible working on a case-by-case basis is not conducive to successful flexible working. Any flexible pattern that is agreed will have an impact on other team or department members, so flexible working will be more robust if it is looked at across the team, and the school, rather than in isolation.
Inevitably, this takes time, and needs to be built into the school calendar. To support this, leaders and HR teams can:
- Build conversations about flexible working preferences into appraisals for all staff, not just those who already work flexibly. This can provide early insights into what staff may be asking for in future.
- Create a schedule for accommodating flexible working requests which allows enough time to explore different options and work around timetabling restraints. Some headteachers start this process in the Autumn term for the following September.
- Involve a range of staff members into the job design process. They need to work together as a team to design jobs that will match the needs of staff, students, and curriculum.
Facilitating job design
It is important to be as creative as possible when thinking about job design. Part-time and job sharing are traditionally used in schools, and these are important parts of the flexible working toolkit. But there are a number of ways that these can be implemented, and a range of other options to consider.
It is particularly worth remembering that, while many members of staff would prefer to work part-time, some would be happy with 0.8 or 0.9 contracts, which are potentially easier to incorporate than 0.5 or 0.6.
With these principles in mind, here are some points to consider:
- When putting together teams to explore flexible options, try to include job holders (who understand the scope of the role), HODs (who understand the needs of the department) and, critically, the timetabler, as well as HR.
- Reviewing the whole job, not just the teaching part of it, is likely to lead to a better outcome. Try to think in advance about what would happen in different circumstances, such as a parents’ evening falling on a non-working day, or how to cover the pastoral responsibilities of a part-time teacher who is also a form tutor.
- It is worth being open to flexing the school day. For example, some schools offer staggered start times, timetabling some teachers’ lessons so they do not teach period one, or moving tutor time to the end of the school day. This allows those with children to do their own school runs.
- As PPA time is not student-facing, consider consolidating a teacher’s allocation into a block so they can do it from home.
- Ensure job share or split classes are well designed and that there is clarity for both parties on overlap, communication, how they work together and accountability
- For primary school class teacher job shares, include handover time. Again, PPA time could be overlapped to facilitate this.
- For secondary school job share partnerships, consider splitting the curriculum so that each part of the share covers separate topics, such as poetry versus novels for English Literature, or specific periods for History.
- Use technology as a way of bringing people together who are not in the same building.
Communicating the process and managing expectations
However carefully the job design process is managed, it is not always possible for every single flexible working request to be met exactly as requested; flexibility needs to work for the school as well as for the individual. What is important is that people are able to raise their flexible working request, discuss the options and reach a mutual agreement.
It is therefore important to manage staff expectations of what is possible, and explain that they too will need to be flexible. Ways to facilitate this include:
- Creating an understanding that fairness is not about everyone having the same outcome, but rather everyone having the same opportunity to discuss their desired outcome.
- Setting expectations by explaining that preferences will be accommodated as far as possible, but cannot be guaranteed, and that staff may need to compromise.
- Clarifying that staff may need to be flexible about their agreed arrangement at times, for example attending CPD sessions or parents’ evenings on a scheduled non-working day. Leaders should approach this as fairly as they can and, where possible, give the time back.
- Noting that agreed patterns are not fixed forever and that they will be reviewed on a regular basis (perhaps annually). This allows both leadership and staff to assess how well an arrangement is working, and to make changes as and when it needs to change.
Taking learnings from Covid-19 into future strategies
Whilst no one would choose to run a school entirely remotely, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced schools to embrace different ways of working that could facilitate increased flexibility. Feedback from academy trusts suggested that, as an increasing number of school leaders worked flexibly, they were testing how well it could work in practice, both for themselves and their staff bodies.
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that investing in flexible working practices now will help schools remain resilient in future, allowing them to flex around staff who need to make short term changes to their working patters to deal with health needs or caring responsibilities.
Schools can use what they and others have learned during the Covid-19 pandemic to build longer-term flexible working strategies and processes. These changes do not have to be radical or disruptive; schools could start by taking small steps to build on what has been learned, and then try something new, which can be highly effective. For example:
- Staff have become increasingly aware of how different flexible working arrangements can support different parts of their roles, such as taking time away from the school building to focus on strategic thinking.
- Leaders from a number of schools have reported making more time for one-to-one meetings with team members, and gaining a better understanding of their responsibilities outside of work as a result. Continuing with this will support wellbeing and motivation as well as feeding into job design.
- The increased use of platforms such as Zoom and MS Teams has created a way of bringing staff together when they are not in the same place. This could allow staff who are working from home to attend staff meetings, or bring together team members in multi-site schools.
- Similarly, some interaction with parents and carers could be carried out remotely, such as holding parents’ evenings or open evenings virtually, to allow more working parents and carers to attend.
- Use of technology has also been accelerated in other areas, such as using packages to plan and design lessons. This could help create shared resources for departments and even support delivery of cover lessons.
Clearly, some of these examples rely on schools and families having sufficient access to technology, which can be a challenge for some schools.
Summary
It is no exaggeration to say that the Covid-19 pandemic ripped up the rulebook as far as flexible working is concerned, with 13 million people in the UK workforce planning to ask to retain some flexibility when they return to work.[1] Feedback from a number of trusts indicates that this is true in the teaching profession, with staff saying they are keen to continue doing some work from home, participating in remote school, team and parent meetings, and moving some CPD online.
Schools which embrace, explore, and deliver flexible working will be well-placed to hang on to their talented staff, and attract the best new ones. These principles and insights in this article should help you get started; to see an example of how flexible working can work in practice, take a look at this case study from Huntington School in York.
[1] https://www.directlinegroup.co.uk/en/news/brand-news/2020/140520200.html
