School leaders have an incredibly difficult job when managing their staff.
On the one hand, you want your effective and most competent teachers to stay at your school but at the same time, you need to let people go so they can move on.
Clearly, there is a balance to be made and no one should stand in the way of ambitious staff hungry for advancement, training and promotion but you also need to keep hold of staff for the stability of the school community.
It’s never a good thing when staff are coming and going all the time because continuity is important and a school community can soon begin to wobble and breakdown without it.
A key part of driving a school forward is to develop staff and encourage them not to leave your school or leave teaching altogether. This is why all staff deserve a ‘stay’ interview.
Stay interviews are an incredibly useful engagement strategy because they allow you to identify ‘pain points’ and areas of improvement before they become reasons for staff to start grumbling and looking for greener pastures.
Stay Interviews
A ‘stay’ interview is more of an informal chat to get feedback, an opportunity to compliment, praise, energise and inspire staff to stick around. It’s the opposite of an exit interview.
This is a chance for you to ask all staff what they think works and what needs fixing. It gives people a chance to say whether they are happy or not and how improvements could be made to their working life as well as what their ideas are for taking the school forward.
Stay interviews can be influential in keeping staff happy as well as increasing their loyalty and overall school commitment because it builds bonds, strengthens relationships and makes sure everyone is listened to.
You may think that you know staff well, but do you? A stay interview can often reveal plenty you didn’t know about their thoughts and ideas. You simply don’t know what staff are really thinking until you ask them.
A stay interview therefore gives school leaders lots of golden opportunities to gauge how well they are meeting the needs of their staff and crucially what they aren’t doing and what they could be doing better.
It gives you a chance to empower staff, help them achieve better work-life balance, increase the likelihood of alignment on vision and help them feel wanted.
In a stay interview, staff should feel free to get off their chest what they need to say and leaders can take on board suggestions for making their lives and school life better.
School leaders need to hang on to their well-motivated and dedicated teachers and they should be told frequently how good they are and how important they are to the school’s work. As a school leader, you will be doing this week in and week out but a ‘stay’ interview is something that allows you more privacy to chat and discuss.
Stay interviews should be something held at least once a year so that you can take the pulse of the staff and respond before any matters reach a head and issues go unrecognised and unresolved.
What to ask?
A stay interview of 30 mins – 1 hour can give you tremendous insights into what staff like and love about working in their school and what can be improved but you need to ask relevant questions.
What you ask should be the same for everyone so that there is a consistency of approach – remember, some staff will compare notes!
Examples of what you could ask include:
- What do you look forward to most when you come to school every day?
- What excites you to come into school?
- What keeps you working at our school?
- What are your career aspirations?
- What motivates and demotivates you?
- What do you like most or least about working here?
- On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you? How can we get you to a 10?
- Do you feel that you are making an impact?
- Do you see a future for yourself at the school?
- What do you dread about coming to school every day?
- If you could change something about your job, what would that be?
- What would make your job more satisfying?
- Do you feel valued and recognised within the school?
- How would you like to be recognised for the work you do?
- When was the last time you thought about leaving us?
- What do you want to be doing that you aren't currently doing?
- Has anything happened during your time here that made you think about finding another job?
- What might cause you to leave the school?
- What kinds of flexibility would be helpful to you in balancing your work and home life?
- What situation made you think of leaving?
- What is the best part about your job?
- What are the obstacles getting in your way that stop you from being better at your job?
- What are we not doing as a school that you feel we should be?
- What talents, interests or skills do you have that we haven’t made the most of?
- What kind of feedback about your performance or recognition would you like that you aren’t currently receiving?
- What would make your job better than it is?
- What are the three most important things you would like to accomplish right now?
- What can the senior leaders do more or less of?
- What do you think of the CPD opportunities given to you?
- What opportunities for self-improvement would you like to have that go beyond your current role?
- Do you have enough resources to do your job? If not, what is missing?
- What would you change about the way we work with parents?
- How would you describe your Year group/Department and how well they work together?
- How could senior leaders support staff to collaborate even more?
- If you were a school leader for the day, what would you do differently?
- What can I do to best support you?
- What can I do more of or less of as your line manager?
- Do you feel that you are part of a bigger vision and mission?
- Is the school providing you with opportunities to grow and develop as a person and as a professional?
- Is there anything else that is important to you that we did not cover during this meeting?
These are just a sample of the questions you could ask and are they are not intended for you to use in their entirety. Cherry-pick your questions and add some of your own.
Basically, school leaders should approach a stay interview conversation as: help me understand how you’re doing and what the school can do for you to make sure you’re thriving and staying with us as an enthusiastic member of staff.
Stay interviews are an opportunity to both uncover what motivates individuals and to also build trust.
But that trust can soon evaporate unless leaders actually act on the feedback they gather during the chat, take staff input seriously and change things. If they don’t, staff soon end up disengaged and will start to look elsewhere.
As a school leader, it’s your job to act on this feedback for the benefit of the school as a whole and to see how you can provide the tools, resources and opportunities into being that will make your staff stay put.
A key reminder to all staff is that stay interviews are confidential which isn’t normally an issue if your school has a collegiate culture that encourages open communication.
And finally….
Retaining talent is hard but happy teachers don’t get sick or leave. This is why stay interviews are so important because they provide insights into day-to-day experiences and allow staff to speak their minds openly and without worry.
Stay interviews are a window into how individual members of staff are thinking and they are great for identifying patterns and trends. For example, they may reveal why some people stay or leave multiple times.
At a time when more and more teachers are leaving the profession, stay interviews could make a key difference in retaining staff and so they should be integrated into leadership and management practice as a matter of urgency. Job engagement and satisfaction is a school’s top priority because without settled, secure and motivated staff, schools will always be in a state of flux and uncertainty.
A key function of leadership isn’t to produce more followers but produce more leaders. As Kevin Harcombe (2010) says in ‘How to survive and succeed as a Headteacher’, “The mark of a great leader is how many leaders they leave behind.”
Not everyone will want to be a senior leader but all staff have leadership qualities that should be developed and all staff need to know they are valued as key players within the school.
As a school leader, having the commitment to doing what you can to make school a great place for staff to work is crucial.
Stay interviews can help you reduce overall attrition, retain top teachers, and assess staff mental health and wellbeing within school.
About the author
John Dabell
John is an ex-primary school teacher and Ofsted inspector who has spent the last 20 years working in the education industry as a teacher, writer and editor. John’s specialist area is primary maths but he also loves teaching science and English. John has written a number of educational and children’s books, and contributed over 1,000 articles and features to various educational bodies. John is Eteach’s school leadership and Ofsted advice guru, sharing insights on best practice for motivating and enriching a school team, as well as sharing savvy career steps for headteachers and SLT.