Tes attended the Education Secretary's flexible working summit at the ARK All Saints Academy in Camberwell in London today. The event brought together 40 influencers from across the world of education and business to discuss the barriers and solutions to encouraging more flexible working in schools in the UK. The summit is part of the government's commitment to recruiting and retaining great teachers and tackling the gender pay gap by encouraging employers to support alternative ways of working. We believe Tes can play an important role in both supporting candidates and helping leaders embrace the opportunities.
Tes presented recruitment insights that illustrated current trends in the advertising market and school behaviour. For example, after key recruitment deadlines, secondary schools are nearly twice as likely to advertise roles as part-time; and school can improve their application conversion rate across the majority of subjects if they show willingness to be flexible.
We also committed to support the initiative by:
- Endorsing and encouraging flexible working options as an important recruitment and retention solution for our school customers.
- Ensuring that all job adverts on tes.com will clearly display whether the school will accept job shares and flexible working solutions.
- Build jobs sharing and multiple applicants into the candidate application process for teaching jobs.
- Ensure our talent matching service supports candidates who are looking for job share or part time teaching roles.
- Establish a ‘best employer’ award at the Tes Schools Awards that recognises schools that invest in their teaching staff and support them with progressive working practices.
- Working closely with ASCL to create and promote case studies of schools who are successfully adopting flexible working policies.
You can follow the conversation and updates on the day on Twitter using the #flexworkdfe hashtag.