Publication Source
Yesterday we provided an update on the state of teacher and technician recruitment among secondary schools and colleges in England. This post looks more generally at support and auxiliary staff. In summary, we find that:
- There has been a large and sustained increases in recruitment activity since the end of the pandemic across a wide range of support and auxiliary positions.
- There are, however, differences by type of role. The biggest percentage increases have been for pastoral managers, cover supervisors, caretakers/cleaners and attendance officers. The biggest increases in absolute numbers of adverts have been for teaching assistants, cover supervisors and administrative assistants.
- The persistence of these trends three years after the end of the pandemic may force us to conclude that these are no longer temporary abberations, but a new normal to which the education system must adapt.
As with our previous study of support and auxiliary positions, published in September 2022, this analysis uses a more rough and ready approach than the one we apply to adverts for teachers and technicians. All of our recruitment analyses make use of an automated system to identify relevant adverts on school and college websites. For teacher and technician vacancies, we compile the data weekly and carry out manual checks to ensure that none of the items are spurious (ie, that mentions of a role are in the context of a recruitment advert). However, for these occasional dives into support and auxiliary positions, we take a less labour-intensive approach. This makes use of the fact that we already have nightly snapshots of each school and college websites going back over many years, so we can apply the same automatic detection system, but without conducting manual checks on each advert, which would be impractical over such a vast archive.
