It seems apt given both the financial situation schools are finding themselves in but also the recruitment issue to point out that we’re STILL doing our bit. At the start of the 2014 academic year we launched SchoolScanner and contacted every school – initially there was a rush of jobs appearing but we’ve had to take our eye off the ball, as we have day jobs as teachers don’t you know, but the site gets used regularly and that is fantastic to see. We make nothing out of this and in fact is costing us money (it isn’t a lot so don’t feel sorry for us!) but it helps us sleep at night knowing that even if a small number of schools have saved some money we’ve helped – I mention our rationale behind setting this up in this post. We’ll continue to do this for the foreseeable future and maybe when we’ve got some quality time we’ll go for it big time.

There are currently over 3400 UK education jobs advertised on TES and if each job costs JUST £1500 (be under no illusion that an advert  is not this cheap) to advertise that is a lot of money that should be staying in education and not going to some corporate coffers – for some schools it is at the point where they may as well pay a regular sum direct to recruitment advertising sites when they receive their funding. I’m not suggesting that ££’s would solve the retention issue but it would help in some circumstances. Let’s put that in context: this number of jobs is a snapshot and the average advert is on the site only for about 2 to 3 weeks so the money (I’d suggest someone else does the Maths!! It’s scary money) being spent on advertising is the same amount on a regular basis and not just a one-off! So heres an idea for you DFE … develop a recruitment site that is FREE for schools to use. We did it (ok it cost us a fair bit to get developed professionally!) and we don’t have your resources. So instead of spending your money on initiatives that result in 120 new teachers (a drop in the ocean), and I say it glibly,  just imagine how much you could save schools with something like SchoolScanner!