Behavioural Attributes for Success in Education Recruitment

August 2024

The Labour government want to address the education recruitment and retention crisis. What could this look like?

With the ushering in of the new Labour government, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has begun work on recruiting 6,500 new teachers across the UK, in efforts to address and repair the government’s relationship with the sector. Amongst a host of pledges, the party endeavour to scrap VAT exemptions and business rates relief for private schools to instead concentrate this money on recruitment initiatives. The DfE will resume and expand their teacher recruitment campaign Every Lesson Shapes a Life, and restart its further education recruitment campaign Share Your Skills, offering a host of apprenticeships including classroom teaching opportunities.

The Labour government must address the causes of low education recruitment to reach their ambitious goal of recruiting 6,500 teachers

We welcome this immediate focus on teacher recruitment, as it is clearly intended to address the ongoing retention crisis and earn back the education sector’s faith in the government. However, we must consider if further steps are needed to meet the recruitment challenge, given the Department’s ambitious goal of 6,500 and the low retention rates in the sector.

Recruitment and Soft Skills

Effective recruitment increasingly focuses on personal and professional attributes or skills (sometimes referred to as soft skills). By emphasizing behavioural traits like resilience, conscientiousness, and emotional regulation, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of a candidate’s capabilities and insight into their suitability for teaching. Attributes like team-work and having compassionate interpersonal skills are crucial to achievements in any workplace, but in schools, they can indicate staff’s capability to be effective, professional, and to contribute positively to the overall functioning of the school.

In Australia, it is a requirement for teacher training organisations to screen for non-cognitive attributes. The VET Development Centre in Victoria states that noncognitive traits are equally, if not more important than cognitive aspects in employment potential, especially in regards to the demands of functioning in the 21st century. A bias-prone approach could result in turning away passionate candidates who might thrive in a classroom environment, from a profession already suffering from low recruitment and teacher dissatisfaction.

The Case for Behavioural Attributes

Assessing behavioural traits using SJTs adds a reliable dimension to traditional, inflexible application methods, which often prevent candidates from showcasing the non-cognitive skills that could make them great teachers. Enhancing recruitment processes in this way can improve recruitment decisions by providing a more comprehensive evaluation, potentially uncovering hidden talent that can be nurtured in a professional setting. Employers highly value the ability to work collaboratively, emotional maturity, perseverance, and conscientiousness. Without evidence-based screening that reduces bias, we may fail to identify and unlock a candidate’s potential.

Making such screening a central part of recruitment practices for both trainees and qualified teachers can create a more diverse and supportive workforce, which supports teacher retention. Successful teachers want to work in schools where they are valued, and investing in high-quality professional learning that places the teacher at the centre of their professional journey is likely to build their commitment to teaching and ultimately help retain them.

An iPad with teaching recruitment software on the screen. — An example of T-Screen – this technology uses SJTs to immerse candidates in realistic examples of classroom situations.

Moving Forward

A screening process for behavioural attributes, similar to that of Australia, could serve as a key tool in the Labour government’s ambitious quest to repair their relationship with the education system, and address the education recruitment and retention crisis. Their propositions certainly suggest a promising start, but we should evaluate the teacher training and development systems at their core to best support these ambitions. We are pleased to be partnering with the DfE to engage more people in teaching as a career option using our T-Attract tool, and we welcome the Department’s enthusiasm for innovative technologies. We encourage the acceleration of adoption of new ideas and technologies and hope that the new government can be instrumental in enabling this.

To find out more about T-Attract and T-Screen, visit out website here or contact us about a free trial here.