February half term is expected to be a peak time for teachers to tie down new job roles for September, if the Christmas holidays were anything to go by, according to the UK’s largest online education recruitment provider. Traffic on the Eteach job board during the holidays has increased as teachers take control of their careers, researching the employers with the most favourable working conditions. During the Christmas holiday just past, more than 4,000 teachers searched the Eteach site on Christmas Day itself and incredibly, the website had nearly 400 visits in the two minutes around midnight on New Year’s Eve.
In true reflection of the shift to job hunting online, New Year’s morning was a peak time to take advantage of online application processes: Individual job pages received 700,000 hits.
Job seekers don’t stay on each job long though: once a specific search is made, each advert only gets just over a minute and a half of average reading time. This means the schools need to have concise and welcoming ads, with clear job specifications, backed up with an impressive career site.
The data comes at a time when teaching recruitment is expected to hit crisis point. Pupil numbers have increased by 1.4% (121,000) this year yet funding for many schools has been cut. The teacher shortage is very real which means that schools will have to drastically overhaul their methods to attract talent cost-effectively this year.
Eteach CEO and founder Paul Howells comments: “The activity is unsurprising given the amount of teachers looking to make a change to their workload and lifestyle. We predict that as wages fail to keep up with the cost of living in 2017, education professionals will flood to the forward-looking schools that are bold enough to declare their policies on reasonable and sustainable work-life mix. They need to have their websites and contact routes ready to capture the best talent now.
“The schools who capture these keen applicants are those promoting their employer brand with career sites with a clear online profile detailing the wellbeing attitudes of that workplace, paired with a recruitment marketing partnership which gives them social media presence.”
In education, 100,000 – 120,000 permanent teaching roles are recruited for annually across Englandi.
The government has missed its targets for teacher training for the fourth year running and 10% (45,000)ii of educational professionals are expected to leave the industry all together in 2017.
[i] Department for Education National Pupil Projections July 2015, cited in The Squeeze: schools’ response to constraints in teacher recruitment, published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 2016, p.7.
[ii] Department for Education/National Statistics report: School workforce in England, Nov 2015. Ref SFR 21/2016 30 June 2016, published on www.gov.uk.