School workforce planning during the COVID-19 second wave

School workforce planning during the COVID-19 second wave

Last year, a sector-first research report set out recommendations for a fresh approach to designing teaching roles and school organisational structures.

The TIDE 2020 report, published by workforce planning company PeopleBench, was based on data contributed by 98 catholic and private schools educating more than 40,000 students across Australia.

The final report produced from the data will allow educators to see how their priorities and plans compare to others in the sector, as well as informing policymakers on where best to target support in a post-COVID schooling landscape.

With the current lockdowns in NSW and Queensland looking as if they might drag on for some time, principals are trying their best to ensure a robust workforce strategy in their teaching and learning environments.

However, PeopleBench CEO, Fleur Johnston, says the education sector as a whole is “largely using intuition” to guide its strategy development and that a serious recalibration is needed.

“As the effects of lock downs continue and communities come to terms with the stark realisation that schools are not immune as places where spreading of the virus can occur, school leaders are increasingly recognising that changing their “Service Delivery Model” – the ways in which schooling is delivered – is not just a crisis response measure,” Johnston told The Educator.

“Factors like teacher supply shortages, high early career turnover, teacher burnout and ageing workforce profiles were all pressures, in place prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, that were challenging leaders to address how they’re going to deliver schooling with a significantly different workforce profile in the future.”

Johnston says leaders recognise that as their Service Delivery Models are changing (more online, more expectation of flexibility in hours, content choice etc), their workforce has to change too.

“As a result, whole new processes for ensuring that schools have a workforce strategy, and have actively looked at how their organisational structures and role design [the mix of accountabilities assigned to a job and the knowledge and skills required to deliver them] will need to change has become essential work for leadership and governance groups across the sector,” she said.

“Schools need to look at their processes for workforce strategy, build their strategic HR capacity and capability and use their workforce data in tandem with their student data to make better decisions about how they will reshape in the future.”

Earlier this year, PeopleBench launched the Workforce Resilience Tracker, which helps educators build individual and school-wide resilience via the use of reliable data.

The PeopleBench Resilience TrackerTM was specifically designed for measuring school workforce resilience over time, providing leaders with insights into the factors which most need attention in their schools – targeting their efforts to support staff to travel well through the inevitable ups and downs of school life.

“We know that educators face increasingly challenging behavior from the children and adults they interact with in the course of doing their jobs. This, on top of a significantly disrupted delivery environment means that change and challenge are constant for people who work in schools,” Johnston said.

“We also know from the psychology literature that the concept of Resilience is something which is not static – we can teach adults in workplaces specific strategies to in order to position them at their best to deal with the complexity and stressors associated with their jobs.”

Johnston said that schools using the tracker have seen response rates consistently above 90%, suggesting that staff want to be engaged in discussions about how they’re travelling and how leaders can support them.

“Principals have been able to identify specific groups of staff, such as younger workers versus older workers, that might require a higher level of support or a different type of support,” she said.

“In some cases, they’ve been able to identify – based on a combination of data from the Resilience TrackerTM and discussions about the data with their staff – a need to redistribute tasks and relief time differently across teaching and middle leadership roles. This reinforces the importance of role design as another concrete strategy for addressing some of the factors that deplete teacher resilience”.