Flexible working in schools: time to do better

There has been an enormous amount of concern in recent years about the challenge of recruiting and retaining teachers.. The problem has proven intractable for a succession of policy makers (both here and abroad) and meanwhile, schools, and their staff and students, bear the brunt. 

There are multiple reasons why teachers leave the classroom. I’m one of the millions who have done it (with no small amount of anguish) - and there were many factors in my decision. 

In no particular order: workload; stress; lack of support as an early career teacher; endless admin; poor student behaviour; a punishing accountability system; the demands of supporting high numbers of SEND and EAL pupils; tricky parents; wanting more of a life outside work; and wanting a family. 

But that was in the noughties. Cut to 2025, and we now have an additional and in some cases greater factor at play than all of the above. A lack of flexibility for staff. 

This was always an issue in teaching - in my early thirties, I very deliberately left before I had my children, not after, because I could not fathom how on earth I would do an already demanding job while caring for kids I hadn’t even conceived yet. How would I work until 9pm while feeding, bathing and putting a child to bed? Would I have any energy left to play with them or read to them after a day in the classroom? Looking around me, every full-time teacher-parent I met seemed to be struggling and knackered, and it didn’t look sustainable.  

But post-pandemic, the challenge of a lack of flexibility in teaching has been compounded by the fact that most graduate jobs (the traditional teacher pipeline) offer considerable flexibility in hours and location. How do schools and trusts compete with non-teaching jobs that allow staff to balance whatever else is going on in their lives with their professional duties? 

At The Key Group, this is a problem that keeps many of us awake at night. While we’re not in the business of teacher recruitment, we are in the business of building digital tools to make the lives of schools and their staff easier. We think deeply about how our products can enable schools to support flexible working, creating things like:

• Guidance and case studies in our content, as well as policies, checklists and job descriptions to support job shares, part time workers and flexible conditions and contracts on The Key

• The ability to timetable staff around other responsibilities they have outside of school, such as dropping off and picking up their own children from other settings, via TimeTabler

• The possibility for leaders in schools and trusts to track their own progress in offering flexible working arrangements, as well as the pay, progression and leaving rates of those staff compared to others, via Arbor

• The support for leaders in schools to manage their HR processes when staff request flexible working, via SAMpeople

• The ability of governors and trustees to ask the right questions of leaders about what they’re doing to support flexible working, via GovernorHub

None of these, in isolation or collectively, are enough.  And we’re keen to do more to see schools and the people in them thrive.

Back in the summer we convened a cross-Group working party, through which we’ve:

• Brought in experts on teacher workforce data, like Jack Worth at NFER

• Spoken to sector leaders who deeply understand maternity leave in teaching, like Emma Shepherd

• Visited trusts who are enabling job shares at leadership level through careful timetabling, such as the Leathersellers Federation 

• Collected aggregated national data, via Arbor, to better understand what happens to teachers once they’ve had maternity leave (on everything from leaving rates, to pay and progression, to contract changes) 

In support of this, there are two external projects we’re getting involved with, both of which give us hope that there is an enormous will to improve the conditions of teaching to ensure we see more teachers choosing to stay in the profession. The first is The Teaching Commission, led by Dame Mary Bousted, where we’re supporting their understanding of what is happening in schools, as their data partner. More to come on that in a future post. 

The second is our support for a brilliant campaign run by the MTPT Project and The New Britain Project. Led by Emma Shepherd and Anna McShane, their 2024 report, “Missing Mothers”, shone new light onto the single biggest group leaving teaching each year since 2017: women in their thirties. 

Their report argues that the exodus of this group, representing 25% of the teaching workforce, is exacerbating issues with pupil behaviour and workload, creating a vicious cycle for more teachers to leave. Their survey indicates that among this cohort of women aged 30-39, their decision to leave teaching is heavily influenced by excessive workload, family commitments and a lack of flexible working arrangements. 

They also show that 56% of mother-teachers in this age group cite the conflict between job demands and personal responsibilities as a primary reason for leaving, and that what they’re looking for is not, what some might assume, a “fully remote” job, but for meaningful accommodations in their role, such as the ability to attend significant events in their children’s lives (the oft-quoted nativity, but likely also the annual class assembly, sports day or year 6 leavers’ presentation, among others), and more adaptable timetabling options for the regular (but maybe less nominally “significant”) events - picking up their child once a week from school to get them to a swimming lesson, for example.

While supporting the “missing mothers” to stay in or join the profession is only one way of addressing the recruitment and retention crisis, we think it’s an excellent place to start. As with my own experience of teaching, it’s not just about those who are currently juggling, but also showing those who are at the start of their careers that this is a profession that will ultimately work with a future in which children may be a part - that it’s worth staying for.

We’re proud to be one of a number of organisations that are sponsoring an upcoming virtual conference on this subject - taking place over two mornings on Friday 21st and Saturday 22nd March 2025. Run by MTPT, it’s called “Missing Mothers: retaining and supporting valued colleagues in the workforce”. If you’d like to find out more, have a read of their impressive line-up of speakers and panellists and treat yourself to a very reasonably priced ticket here. Small children, clearly, are welcome. 

We’ve managed to secure 3 free tickets, and will be running a prize draw to win them on Monday 3rd March. If you’d like to enter, just tell us your email address here. Anyone is free to apply. 

Let’s make this a priority.