Recruit

If we are going to improve recruitment to our individual schools and to the profession generally, we have to put staff first.

Thinking about recruitment in more detail, there are several elements of the teacher recruitment process which can be managed in a way which helps identify the best possible person for the post and puts the immediate needs of the candidates first.

It is worth being very open with candidates about the main features of the culture you are attempting to create at your school, so that you have a “cultural fit” against which you can judge the candidates, and a description of the institutional culture they can reflect upon before deciding whether they would want to work at your school.

You can only see candidates at their best and, consequently, have the best possible chance of selecting the right person, if they are as relaxed as they can possibly be. If you are leading the day, you need to go out of your way to help them feel comfortable.

At Huntington we obsessed about four things, which seemed to us to be the essentials of being a teacher in a state school today: subject knowledge; the ability to forge good working relationships with students; resilience; and the acceptance of the professional obligation to improve your practice.

The best final panel interviews become conversations and that can only happen if you, as the interviewer, are expert in your knowledge of teaching and learning and the interviewee feels safe.

Finally, when it comes to recruiting, it is worth remembering the joy of the job. Geoff Barton once wrote a piece about reclaiming “the career of teaching for what it can be”, of remembering to value “the arts, the sport, the modern foreign languages, the extra-curricular experiences that will help our young human beings to become ever more distinctively human” (Barton, 2018). Geoff’s rallying cry is no flimsy, liberal nonsense; the essence of what Geoff says is at the heart of the solution to the recruitment crisis. If we, as school leaders, cannot make teaching an attractive, deeply satisfying, joyful job where, as employees – our most precious resource – their needs are put first, then our children will never have in front of them the high-quality teachers they deserve.