Key Issues for SEND recruitment for 2023
At Senploy our focus on special needs recruitment gives us a unique insight into the changing roles in special schools and special needs teams in mainstream schools. We’ll use these articles to keep you up to date with changes that may impact how you recruit!
At the end of last term OFSTED released their annual report for 2022 – it was concerning to see that staff shortages and problems accessing SEND help both came high in their list of issues holding back education. You can read the details of the report in this BBC article .
In response we asked the SEN recruitment community for their thoughts on the crisis. We started with a LinkedIn poll ( follow our MD Amy Allen to be invited to take part in future ones ) as well as asking for individual feedback from our contacts in schools and recruitment companies.
What is holding back SEN recruitment?
Our poll asked which of these 4 key issues was the biggest challenge in 2023 for SEN recruitment. The results, from 115 industry experts, were…
- Lack of experience available - 20%
- Salary levels too low - 70%
- Rigid recruitment policies - 7%
- Competitors snapping up talent – 3%
There was a clear consensus that salary levels were the biggest issue – perhaps not surprisingly when so many in the special needs community are paid close to the national minimum wage and there are alternatives paying more in areas such as retail. Teachers in the SEN community may earn more but they have been hit by a ‘decade of lost pay growth’ according to the think tank Public First .
The second biggest issue was lack of experience – this may again be due to people leaving the sector. It does suggest that employers might be able to improve recruitment if they were able to recruit and then train people in SEN skills. It is interesting that Education Secretary Gillian Keegan’s New Year message touched on this as she said she would be ‘looking at more teaching apprenticeships’ to bring people into teaching faster.
Compared to these two issues, fewer people cited rigid recruitment policies (perhaps a sign that these are being relaxed!) or competition (although this may change as anecdotally we are hearing of more schools ‘headhunting’ key staff). Of course, as Simon Dwek, Recruitment Business Partner at Orchard Hill College and Academy Trust, said, they might all be factors – he commented ‘all of the above, depending on the role’.
James Lowe, CEO Of Grolife, gave us his thoughts on how to help solve the recruitment challenge, commenting,
“We need to not be solely reliant on teachers coming through the school-college-university route and be attracting a variety of people from a range of ages, sectors and life experiences. I wonder (I don’t know the answer) if FE institutions are facing as big a staffing crisis. They have tendencies to recruit people who are time served in other industries or sectors.”
What do you think? Please share your ideas!