Teachers at a west London school can sleep in and savour a fry-up after they were given two periods off every week in a move dubbed the “Holy Grail of recruitment and retention”.
Andrew O’Neill, the headteacher of All Saints Catholic College in Ladbroke Grove, said teachers should be treated like “elite athletes” who needed a lot of rest so they could excel at what could be an “exhausting” job.
‘The retention Holy Grail?’
From this week, teachers at the local-authority overseen school can arrive at school at 10.45am one day a week – although pupils still have the same number of lessons, taught by the same teachers.
O’Neill said the school could afford the change because it was “funded well in the [national funding] formula” because of its “really difficult circumstances” – but also because it did not have its income sliced by an academy trust.
The policy is the culmination of a three-part strategy that started in 2019 as the school started to grow and, with it, its budget.
The number of lessons teachers were allocated was slashed and class sizes reduced.
Step three was timetabling to offer something “semi-flexible to staff”.
“This is the Holy Grail in terms of teaching recruitment and retention,” O”Neill said.
The latest Department fort Education data shows nearly a third of teachers leave the profession within five years, while the workforce grew by just 259 full-time equivalent teachers last year
Teachers on two-thirds timetable
Teachers at All Saints now teach 20 lessons a week out of a possible 30 – typically down by about five or six lessons compared with 2016 when O’Neill took over.
And in the past couple of years most class sizes have reduced from 30 to 22 pupils.
For a teacher with six classes, that’s 10 books fewer per class or 60 fewer to mark in total.
Ajay Narisetti, head of RE, has time off every Wednesday. This week he took his daughter to her first day at secondary school, grabbed a coffee and read the news before his start time.
Teachers have hit the “jackpot” with the policy, he said. Others planned lie-ins or gym classes.
But as department for Education survey found more than half of teachers did not think flexible working was compatible with a career in teaching.
It is also difficult for schools to fit around timetables – and it’s expensive. To timetable the new policy, All Saints moved tutor time to afternoons, when all teachers are in. Statutory morning roll call is now done by those teaching period one.
How can the school afford it?
The school has not costed the new policy, said O’Neill, because it’ was “hard to quantify as a separate piece” from smaller class sizes and lighter timetables.
The school’s annual budget is about £9 million after pupil numbers leapt from 394 to 900 in recent years.
It has the 210th highest per pupil funding of just over 3,000 secondary schools in the funding formula allocation data – putting it in the top 10 per cent.
However, it spends about 80 per cent on staff, although government guidance says staffing costs over 80 per cent of income are “considered high”. Seventy per cent is more usual.
Staffing costs ran at about 77 per cent of budget in previous years, but are up as a result of taking on extra teachers to whittle down class sizes, O’Neill said.
In 2016, All Saints had 32 teachers. It now has 69.
“We’ve been working towards this for about five or six years and slowly ensuring our budget can cope with it. You can’t jump to this all in one go.”
Pupil make-up also makes it feasible with pupil premium funding for about half of pupils, while 27 per cent have SEND and 10 per cent have education health and care plans – attracting more cash.
The teacher workforce is also relatively young.
Flexible working becomes popular
A Department for Education survey showed the proportion of teachers and leaders with flexible working arrangements rose from 40 per cent in 2022 to 46 per cent in 2023.
The proportion of teachers granted ad-hoc requests to start work late or finish early rose from 7 to 14 per cent.
O’Neill said he could not afford the changes if his school were an academy.
Kensington and Chelsea Council takes about £70,000 in de-delegation funds from his budget annually.
“Academies are currently taking about 4.25 per cent top slice – and that’s generous – which would be £382,500.
“So, I’m saving about £300,000 a year by not being an academy… which allows me to do things like offer flexible working to my staff.”
The Kreston accountancy group found the average top-slice among large trusts stood at 5.4 per cent.
But trust chiefs say running more services in-house – such as estates management and IT – frees up time for headteachers, as well as providing more cash for their schools.
O’Neill’s said the trust system had “brought about lots of good”.
“But maintained schools have their strengths as well. And the strengths that I’ve got here is autonomy and the ability to be innovative and show what can be done.”
