Department for Education's call for retired teachers to return to schools to help with staffing shortages

Message from DfE:

You’ll be that aware the Education Minister has called for ex-teachers to return to the classroom to support schools and colleges to manage staff absence in the New Year. We’d like to thank you for the valuable role you are playing in enabling ex-teachers to be ready to join the temporary workforce from January. We wanted to share the updates below, and hope you find this useful. We will continue to provide updates over the coming weeks.

FAQs

Please find a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ document here.

Safeguarding protocols

DBS checks, along with other pre-employment checks are important safeguarding measures. Currently, 80% of Enhanced DBS checks are issued within the 14-day service target and over 30% are issued within 1 day. The Department for Education will continue to engage with the Disclosure and Barring service to monitor timescales to ensure they can react as appropriate to any spikes in demand.

Case Studies

We plan to evolve our marketing campaign as we move into the new year. To this end, we’d be grateful if you could nominate ex-teachers that have returned to the profession (as a result of this campaign) who would be happy to feature in case studies. We believe that the ‘teachers voice’ could be particularly compelling, and we’re keen to harness that moving forwards.

CPD for supply teachers

 We wanted to make you aware of the resources available through Oak National Academy that might support the recruitment and then effectiveness of colleagues who might return to the classroom in the coming weeks. Please also feel free to pass this onto existing supply teachers.

Oak National Academy has over 40,000 free and easy to access lessons and resources for 4-16 year olds across a wide range of subjects. All of the lessons have been created by teachers for teachers and cover just about everything a supply teacher might be asked to cover. Oak’s own data shows that over 40% of teachers already use Oak National Academy to support them with cover lessons. We hope that these resources will be able to make a contribution in situations including where:

• A potential new recruit does have the time to cover lessons but may be worried about the additional time required to plan and resource lessons from scratch. 
• A potential new recruit might be confident in their subject but worried about covering lessons beyond their subject specialism. 
• A potential new recruit might feel ‘rusty’ and want support with them, particularly during those first few lessons. 

Please find a document attached with more information on how to use Oak. If supply teachers need any further support Oak National Academy will be hosting a dedicated webinar in the New Year. Please sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear when these webinars are live. In the meantime supply teachers can take at a look at the planning page on our website and our help and support centre.

The impact of this campaign

The Department is very keen to understand the impact of campaigns such as this one. We would be grateful if you could record the number of ex-teachers that indicate that their decision to return to the classroom was related to this drive. We will be in touch early in January with further details about this.