Limited remote working opportunities have made teaching ‘an unattractive outlier’, a teaching union has warned.
The education sector is “increasingly struggling to compete against other industries and professions to recruit staff of all ages”, a report by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) said.
“Societal and technological shifts have left teaching looking like an unattractive outlier in a world of remote working and flexible opportunities,” the report said.
The Department for Education extended its flexible working programme earlier this year, but only 2 per cent of teachers had a remote working arrangement in place in 2024.
ASCL said that embedding flexible working practices can help to “improve retention”, but implementation remains challenging for schools.
“Timetabling constraints can make it difficult to accommodate variable work patterns, while traditional leadership roles too often demand full-time availability, limiting options for senior staff”, the report warns.
Attracting high-quality teachers
It adds that remote collaboration, which “enables leaders to manage certain administrative and strategic functions outside of the traditional school setting where feasible”, can help attract high-quality teachers.
The burden placed on school and college leaders and teachers has “never been higher”, the report also cautions.
Schools are having to run food banks and support families with housing issues, as underfunded wider public services “crumble around them”.
ASCL has set out what services schools should reasonably be expected to provide, and which should be the responsibility of other agencies that schools may liaise with.
Areas where schools should not take the lead
Schools should not be expected to take the lead on aspects such as dental checks, the health of pupils’ families, or pupil behaviour on social media out of school hours, the report says.
Earlier this year, the government announced that teachers in some of the most deprived local authorities would be expected to lead supervised toothbrushing sessions for Reception children.
The report also sets out responsibilities that the ASCL said schools might reasonably be expected to take on if they are given adequate funding and resources.
These include providing technology for pupils, pupils’ personal hygiene, ensuring support detailed in education, health and care plans (or EHCPs) is met, and reducing youth violence.
Education ‘needs long-term plan like NHS’
However, ASCL wants the government to set out a long-term plan for education, similar to that for the NHS, and a strategy that clearly maps out who is responsible for different services in local areas.
Schools need enough funding to provide their core responsibilities, the union stresses, and the government must also invest properly in wider children’s services and ensure its child poverty strategy tackles the issues the poorest families are facing.
The government is expected to set out its child poverty strategy this autumn, but has been warned by education leaders not to make “further asks” of schools.
“More needs to be done to clearly distinguish where the core responsibilities of education staff start and end,” said Julie McCulloch, ASCL’s head of policy.
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