The crisis in teacher recruitment and retention is one of education’s major challenges.

In 2024, 8.8 per cent of the workforce left the state sector. Meanwhile, recruitment to initial teacher training remains poor, and although the government has pledged to recruit 6,500 new teachers, experts warn that this might not be enough to fully address staff shortages.

Better pay typically features in conversations about how to solve this issue. But given that the staff shortages persist despite teachers having received regular salary increases in recent years, including a 4 per cent rise this September, pay alone might not be the answer.

Five years ago the pandemic normalised flexible and hybrid working in many other sectors. So is it time for education to catch up?

Leaders at Dixons Academies Trust believed so - which is why they introduced a nine-day fortnight for their teachers in September 2024, attracting a great deal of attention in the sector.

“There’s been a big focus on pay, which is quite right - I think teachers should be paid more than they are,” says Faizal Musa, Dixons’ school and college trust leader (pictured below). “But is that the real reason so many teachers are leaving the profession?”

Not necessarily, according to a report from the National Foundation for Educational Research, which found that 90 per cent of teachers who considered leaving the profession in 2023-24 cited high workload as a factor.

Teaching has become ‘unattainably hard’

Musa’s experience tallies with this. In recent years he and his colleagues have become increasingly aware that teaching is now an “unattainably hard” profession, he says. “People think teachers get all these holidays. But they don’t quite realise, sometimes, how much work teachers do outside of work.”

A year ago the trust reflected on the factors making teaching so difficult, recognising that wellbeing and the level of bureaucracy play a role. Dixons’ leaders asked: “What’s the thing we can do that’s going to have the biggest impact?”

The introduction of a nine-day fortnight for all teachers and senior leaders - that’s almost 800 staff across 17 primary and secondary academies in West Yorkshire and the North West - without cutting students’ contact time was their radical answer.

Musa says that when the trust first detailed its intentions in Tes, many were sceptical. “People said, ‘No, you can’t. You can’t even timetable that,’” he recalls.

One year on, has that scepticism been justified?

The benefits of a nine-day fortnight

Dixons says staff turnover has reduced by 43 per cent - meaning that 60 teachers who statistically would have left have stayed.

In addition, there has been a 9 per cent reduction in staff sickness absence, equating to 518 days’ less cover annually.

As well as showing improvements for current staff, the policy is helping to attract new teachers, too, with the number of applicants up by 12 per cent year-on-year.

All these outcomes have a direct impact on both students’ learning and the trust’s financial status, explains Musa.

A lower turnover “means a lot more stability of staff with greater experience and skill in the classroom”, he says. It also means there is less pressure to recruit new staff in what can be a very challenging market.

The picture is similar with reducing sickness absence. Children benefit from having more consistent teaching, Musa says, while the trust saves £130,000 annually by not having to hire cover staff.

Wellbeing and work-life balance

The policy has also proven to be good for staff wellbeing.

“The teachers have loved it,” Musa says, recounting stories of teachers whose day off has allowed them to attend their child’s school play or their best friend’s wedding.

“We’ve had teachers who have children with special educational needs and they’ve talked about the impact of having that day where they can just take a breath and spend more time with their family.”

“It’s about giving people autonomy and trust around how they do their work”

How the policy works has evolved over the 12 months.

On the whole, teachers are assigned their day randomly according to what is necessary for timetabling to work, and the day then remains the same throughout the academic year.

Musa says some teachers have requested a specific day, which schools have occasionally been able to accommodate - but only if it fits in with everyone else. “This offer is very generous, and we want to be the most flexible employer in the sector...but ultimately, students are our priority so it’s difficult to accept every single request.

He adds that teachers have been understanding about this and points out that there will always be the chance for them to receive a different day in future years.

Within these boundaries, the policy is very much “about giving teachers agency”, Musa says.

“It’s about self-determination and giving people autonomy and trust around how they do their work.”

So, how teachers use that one day a fortnight is up to them. Teachers are encouraged to take the day off to do whatever they like, whether that’s catching up with life admin or having a long weekend away.

Equally, while there is no requirement for teachers to use the day for work, if catching up with some marking then means they aren’t working at the weekend or late on other days, they can.

It sounds like a win-win situation. So how did Dixons manage it?

“Really it was about planning,” Musa says.

Careful timetabling

While everything that makes up the school day has to be considered, timetabling is obviously critical. Musa recognises the work of his colleague Katie Knighton, Dixons’ senior vice-principal and a former maths teacher, in this area.

“She is amazing at making sure the timetabling is done right,” he says, adding that central to the rollout of the policy was ensuring that every school received additional support with timetabling.

He explains that the trust was already well set up for a certain degree of flexibility: “We have always invested significantly in teaching staff, so a lot already had more than the minimum PPA [planning, preparation and assessment] time, which gave us a buffer.”

But the policy still required new approaches, which the trust encouraged schools to develop themselves, sharing ideas about what was and wasn’t working as the year went on.

At secondary, it was sometimes necessary to use split classes - where, for example, in a single week one maths class has lessons with two different teachers, to allow greater flexibility in coordinating timetables.

Musa says that while historically “split classes have been a bit of a no-no” (because of complexities around planning and consistency), so long as the teachers are committed to communicating thoroughly, the approach can, in fact, have benefits.

“We have found that sometimes having two teachers who are a bit different can be quite positive,” he says. For example, a student might not have a great relationship with one teacher, but having half their lessons taught by someone they really get on with means their enthusiasm for the subject doesn’t drop.

‘No difference in contact time’

At primary, implementing a nine-day fortnight was more difficult. Here there is typically less flexibility with timetabling because there are fewer staff.

One solution that the schools found was grouping together subjects led by specialist external teachers - such as music, art or PE - on the same day. “So that enables the primary teacher to take their nine-in-10 day on that day,” Musa explains.

Some might fear this would lead to a drop in attendance on the day when the classroom teacher is not in, but so far Musa says “it’s not something we have encountered”.

The trust hasn’t experienced any concern from parents about split lessons, either - and instead has found that any pushback is much more likely to come when classes are covered by external supply staff.

Indeed, Musa says “most parents haven’t really noticed” the new nine-day fortnight policy because it has meant “no difference in terms of the amount of contact time”.

‘Teething issues’

Naturally, though, the trust did come across some “teething issues” as it rolled out the policy in its first year.

Initially, some Dixons secondaries chose Monday and Friday as the days when teachers could be out. “Obviously people love having a long weekend,” Musa says.

But quickly the schools realised that this wasn’t the best strategy because it means that on any given Monday or Friday, 25 per cent of teachers are off - too many for timetabling to work.

Equally, using all 10 days in a fortnight poses problems since it means that there is no single day when all teachers are working, making events such as parents’ evenings, teacher training or all-staff meetings impossible.

So, after what Musa describes as a few “bumpy” months, the schools realised they needed an “anchor day”: a single day each week when everyone will be in. For Dixons primaries this is Monday, while for secondaries it is Thursday.

An additional tweak to the policy for this academic year is that the first week of term is a mandatory five-day week for all, so that no one misses training or briefings.

The challenge for support staff

Having fine-tuned the teacher policy, now the biggest challenge is how to extend it to support staff.

Currently, the nine-day fortnight is only for teachers and leaders - because the teacher retention and recruitment crisis is what the trust specifically aims to target, Musa explains.

Unfortunately, he says, “it would be really difficult” to roll out the same policy for all support staff because “all the roles are different” and “there can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution”.

However, Musa says the trust is still committed to making non-teaching roles as flexible as possible, through developing hybrid working opportunities or allowing support staff a set number of days of structured time away through the year.

“We absolutely need to take care of all our staff,” he says. “[We need to] make sure that everybody feels as though they get an opportunity for flexibility.”

And given that just a few years ago a nine-day fortnight for teachers seemed an impossibility, who’s to say it will never be doable for support staff, too?

For now, Musa is confident that the nine-day fortnight for teachers and leaders, as well as a degree of flexibility for all, will remain permanent fixtures at Dixons.

With a bit of pre-planning, he says, these are things every trust could implement.

“You can make it work anywhere.”

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