Anyone asking Zoe King if there are any more like her at home is in for a pleasant surprise. There is her middle sister, Trenica, for a start. And then there’s Niki, the youngest.

Not that Terry Creissen, principal of Colne community school in Brightlingsea, Essex, ever needed to ask. For, one by one, in the space of less than two years, the three sisters came to him. And more dedicated teachers he couldn’t wish for. They call them the three Kings or, to be precise, Miss King the first, Miss King the second and Miss King the third. “That’s how the children identify us,” says Zoe, who, as the first sister to arrive at Colne, is naturally Miss King the first. “It’s quite sweet.”

Zoe had been teaching science for five-and-a-half years at another Essex secondary when she felt it was time for a new challenge. She applied for a vice-principal’s post at Colne in 1999, and Mr Creissen was so impressed that he gave her the job. She was 28 at the time.

Then came Niki, now 24. She was also teaching in Essex when she saw a newspaper advertisement for a job at Colne. She asked her big sister, Zoe, about the school, liked what she heard, and decided to apply.

While Zoe was making her mark as a vice-principal and Niki was settling in teaching English and media studies, Trenica, 26, had been making a name for herself as a newcomer to the profession, nominated as the nation’s most outstanding new teacher in the 2000 National Teaching Awards. Her sisters’ boss was on to her like a shot.

Terry Creissen is proactive when it comes to recruitment, and for the past two years has written to every winning teacher of the national awards asking them to come to work at Colne. Trenica King was quick to respond. “I told the girls, ‘I’ve been offered a job at your school - what do you think about that?’ They said it’s a nice school with enthusiastic children and people who like to be here. So I accepted.” That was in September 2001, and is how there came to be three Kings at Colne.

While it’s rare for a school to have three siblings on its teaching staff (their brother Damien, also a teacher, starts work soon at Eton), Mr Creissen sees it as a logical outcome of his approach to recruitment at a time when many teachers are fleeing the profession. “It’s irrelevant that they’re sisters,” he says. “It’s a coincidence. But it fits in with what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to appoint good teachers, and that does often run in families.”

Across public and private sectors, managers faced with skills shortages are increasingly looking for novel ways of identifying and attracting quality job applicants. Unsurprisingly, many have found that existing employees can be a useful recruitment resource, both in terms of getting the message out and recommending suitable applicants.

In business, increasingly popular “recommend a friend” schemes often involve cash bonuses, says Professor Alec Reed in his book, Innovation in Human Resource Management. “The rationale of the current employee in making a referral acts as a natural filter,” says Professor Reed. “In referring a friend they are likely to consider whether or not such a candidate will fit in with the corporate culture and if they are likely to be happy in the company.”

Trenica, who is teaching health and social care, agrees. “Schools are looking for good, reliable teachers and constantly asking staff, ‘Do you know anyone - a friend or a relative - who might do well in this area?’

There’s a constant linking of people, which is why you often have staff coming from the same schools.”

They are used to playing happy families at Colne. Although Mr Creissen’s teacher wife works elsewhere, he does have a son at the school. Colne also employs a couple who met and married while on staff (their surname, as chance would have it, is Prince), two teachers who are partners, and a mother and daughter in administrative posts.

Do family connections cause problems? The three Miss Kings say they rarely come into contact at school, as they work in separate subjects. “We tried to organise a weekly coffee slot to catch up with each other,” says Trenica. “But so far we haven’t managed it once.”

Clearly the children have taken the sisters to their hearts, and Mr Creissen believes such bonds tend to strengthen the sense of community in what is, after all, a community school. “It might be a problem in some schools,” he says. “It depends how you approach it.” His own approach is to do whatever it takes to attract and retain good staff. And if that involves taking risks, so be it. “We do some wacky things sometimes,” he says. “But if people know there’s a good staff development opportunity, they will come here because of it.

“We have one chap - a brilliant IT teacher - who wanted to sail around the world, so we’ve offered him a year’s unpaid sabbatical. We’ve got some staff who don’t want to work five days a week, so they work four; it fits in with their own work-life patterns.”

Some senior teachers are involved in job-sharing arrangements, and one asked if she could take two afternoons off each week. “It has given her a new lease of life,” says Mr Creissen. Which is why he agreed to it.

Doing a 35-hour week is not the solution, he says. “It’s about managing people’s workloads. If we can manage the system for teachers so they can do the job they wanted to do in the first place, which is actually to teach children and push them on, we’ve got to put a lot more money into it.

“And we don’t have to put it in the teachers’ pockets. We put it into the associate and support staff around them. Covering somebody else’s lesson is the biggest area of stress to staff. If I could promise that teachers would never have to cover, that would be tremendous for morale.” He is keen to develop the idea of classroom assistants covering for absent teachers. “The teacher sets up the work, then it’s just a case of planning the transition properly.”

Another radical step is to “lend” experienced teachers to a neighbouring school that’s struggling with “serious weaknesses”. From next September, some Colne staff will go on one-term or one-year contracts, with a bonus payment to help improve the school. “It offers them an insight,” says Mr Creissen, “and gives them a professional challenge without taking away the Colne comfort blanket.”

Of course, there’s more to getting staff onside than allowing them to work flexi-time and reducing the time spent covering for absence. When the King sisters asked each other if teaching at this particular bog-standard comprehensive was an experience worth sharing, it was phrases such as “forward-thinking”, “enthusiastic children” and “really nice school” that they bandied about.

Mr Creissen is keen on kinesthetics - getting children to move around, as he puts it. “We had some disruptive children who had a real problem with behaviour. So we took them off for a day and got them to write down the bad behaviour they would like to get rid of - swearing at teachers, slamming doors and so on. Then we got them to dig a hole and bury the bits of paper. It was transformational, and we’ve repeated it with other children.”

Learning languages at Colne can involve lying on the classroom floor pretending to be a road or searching the entire school for a piece of paper with half a word written on it. (“We cut words in half and spread them around the school so that a vocabulary lesson became a treasure hunt, says Mr Creissen.”) The school has a band (Mr Creissen plays saxophone) and assemblies that double as talent competitions. Every summer, 20 staff take 300 Year 7 children to a campsite, tell them ghost stories and let their hair down. And when there are Saturday morning fixtures (Colne is a sports college) or Wednesday night performances of The Sound Of Music (it also has first-rate music and drama), there is always a good turnout of staff who come along to cheer.

“The problem with being a successful school is that you lose some of your best people,” says Mr Creissen. “Our staff get stolen, which is irritating when you think that you’ve developed them, and someone else is going to reap the rewards. But you have to see education not as just your own school, but as a bigger business. So, yes, we develop people and they move on - quite a few of our staff have taken headships - but that in itself is a success.”

And it’s success that Mr Creissen believes makes for a contented school community. “A happy school doesn’t mean everyone’s going around with a big smile on their face. It’s actually hard work in schools - that’s what the job is about. It’s quite a challenge to get students to do what they don’t really want to do. It’s easy to be happy and not achieve anything. But if the staff are committed to what the school is trying to do, that’s what I would define as a happy school.”

The three Kings certainly have no regrets. “You know what a good school is, no matter what the league tables say,” says Zoe. “And teachers who have children as their focal point want to flock together - to bounce ideas off one another and share the experience. People are always phoning up, and it’s a real buzz, as if this was a little honey pot with everybody buzzing to get in.”

The sisters suddenly see the funny side of Zoe’s unintentional play on words, and dissolve into laughter. Then, with a glance at their watches, they disperse again to opposite ends of the hive. Will they ever make time for that coffee slot? One day, maybe.

CREISSEN’S CRITERIA

Terry Creissen, who was awarded an OBE in 1997 for services to education, believes the key to effective recruitment and retention is to take risks. “I do have some pretty mad staff here,” he says. “We lost that in the Eighties and early Nineties. People became too cautious, and you need to be a bit zany with children to get the spark out of them. You can have problems if the line gets blurred, but I’d rather deal with those than deal with boring teachers. That’s the last thing children need.”

These are his top ten tips for scouting for staff:

* Milk personal contacts: might a friend or neighbour be a good teacher for your school?

* Appoint quality: a poor teacher can do more harm than no teacher.

* Be proactive: estimate how many posts you will need and risk appointing before someone leaves.

* Appoint good classroom practitioners whatever their subject.

* Tap into national or local recruitment schemes and try to offer something unique.

* Invest in your staff with good quality, focused career development.

* Take care that your recruitment strategy doesn’t undermine existing staff.

* Mentor and support staff, investing as much in existing people as in new recruits.

* Empower teachers to create exciting and practical solutions to issues that affect them.

* Make sure your school is involved in training new recruits into the profession.