Very shortly after accepting our jobs in the summer term we were dealt a blow: our NQT wasn’t going to accept his position; our new gaffer dealt with this swiftly and managed to sweet-talk a Physics teacher to come over to “the dark side” and teach maths – he was considering leaving the profession and agreed to stay on a temporary contract until Christmas. “Young Will” (well he’s younger than me!) last week agreed to extend this until the Summer and I’m hoping that may be longer (hint hint Will!).

Around the same time we heard rumours of the costs of recruitment ads in general and we really can’t believe the cost of a SINGLE AD! Rumour has it that schools have been known to spend up to £12,000 on a Headteacher ad alone. This is money that should be staying in school budgets and being spent on the pupils! We are also aware of a local school that spent £8,000 on a fancy ‘all singing, all dancing’ advert that did not get a single applicant. This is just outrageous and given that many schools are facing tighter budgets than ever, is unsustainable.

I am sure you can also tell me similar tales …. Anyway, the final straw was knowing that £1300 is the cost that our school was facing to place an advert for another maths teacher. That money would pay for a lot of photocopying! It’s not as if we don’t have enough to fill our time BUT we just know that this can’t go on and so the three of us behind JustMaths have decided to try to do something to help this money stay in schools – our intention is to offer a fresh approach to teacher recruitment which is why I can now unveil …. SchoolScanner -> TAKE A LOOK

SchoolScanner is a teacher recruitment website that offers unlimited job adverts managed directly and very simply by an admin member of staff within schools (no consultants in the middle getting a cut!) but to make this work, we need help from schools across the country. In order to become the place to search for a teacher job, we need adverts! So for all of the 2014/15 academic year, we are giving every school completely free access to SchoolScanner and next year we will be committing to keep costs fixed for unlimited ads and as low as we can – but again, all of 2014/15 will cost absolutely nothing – no obligation or commitment…so there is NOTHING TO LOSE!

So much money is wasted on recruitment when there is an endless list of other areas of running a school on which this money could be better spent … keeping a TA, improving technology, refurbishments etc. etc. Our prime objective is to save schools money.

LET ME MAKE THIS CLEAR … This will not detract from JustMaths and is totally separate. Nothing changes with JustMaths at all … it’s just something else for us to do .. WE DO LIKE A CHALLENGE! and it just means Fize has more to do!  I just thought I’d share the idea with you (as I’m excited!) and the first emails have started going out to invite schools (if your school hasn’t had one, we’re working through a list of schools and this could take a week or so, please bear with us) to use it and we’ve had our first adverts appearing and some like-minded HeadTeachers have already agreed to place our poster in their staff room too …

Still very very very early days but “from small acorns” …

PS: That’s the one and only time I’ll mention it here but thought I’d share as I don’t want any of you to think I’m hiding anything! So if you do see tweets from @SchoolScanner and think you recognise the “tone” .. yep its me!!