Let me first start by saying, I’ve never written a blog before. I am a blog virgin, some might say. So please bear with me whilst I take you on my own journey of working in education recruitment and why I am very happy that I stopped working for a supply agency.
Those that know me, will know I have a tendency to ramble, and I apologise in advance if this blog takes you on a rather scenic route around life as an education consultant. Having said that, there is method in my madness, so I implore you to have patience and read on.
The important but very simple takeaway from this blog is that Ribbons & Reeves are not, and never will operate as a supply agency.
Why? Well, because teachers that fall asleep when covering classes cannot improve pupil outcomes (TBC)…
But firstly, a little bit about me…
I have worked in education recruitment for 11 years now and for the first four years of my career, I worked for a supply agency.
What does life working for a supply agency look like?
Well, not to be dramatic but the mornings are absolute carnage…
Cover Managers frantically calling you from 7 am needing teachers to get to their school within the hour. “Morning Matt, who have you got for me – I need 6 today?”
But they are not just calling you. They are calling 5 other agencies the second after hanging up on you. So, by the time you’d called the school to confirm your teacher with them, the school have already booked someone from another agency and you then had to cancel your teacher. But your teacher has already left home and is on their way to the school. So, they arrive at the school only to be told they aren’t needed. So, then they get sent home. Then they call you annoyed that they’ve wasted time and money getting to the school and lost out on a day of work.
Copy and paste similar situations like this for the next hour and it’s safe to say, by 8:30 am, your brain is scrambled.
You’ve had to read through AA Route Planner to direct a Maths Teacher to a school because their Sat Nav has run out of battery, you’ve had to apologise to a Cover Manager because someone has turned up in their flip flops and you’ve even had to drive to a school in-person to drop off a shirt and tie because someone has rocked up in a tracksuit (all true stories).
But it’s 8:30 am and you breathe a sigh of relief. The morning rush is over for another day.
But then the phone rings. And the conversation starts with the words you dread…
“Matt, there’s been a bit of a problem with Lyn…”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. What’s happened…?”
“Well, she’s spent most of her day in the staff room talking to the plants…”
Honestly, the anecdotes I have about working in supply are plentiful but I will save them for another day and another blog.
So, how do you succeed as a supply agency?
The truthful answer, volume. In the supply world, the bigger the pool you have built, the more chance you will have of filling a morning booking and thus you prevent another agency from taking that booking from you, and so on, and so on. So, you spend your days sitting on CV Job Boards (like every other agency), registering as many teachers as possible. Most of whom are regulars on the supply scene.
And naturally, the larger the pool of your teachers gets, the more you dilute the quality of those teachers you are working with.
The pressure of filling daily supply bookings, the frantic panic of those 7 am morning calls, the internal company pressure of growing your client base, the fear that if you don’t fill a booking one morning that you might not receive a call from that school for another six months means that you start filling your morning bookings with ‘just a body’ rather than someone who can actually add value to that school community.
That’s something I did not feel comfortable with.
Quality should always come first.
Learning outcomes for pupils should always come first.
And if someone lives locally to a school, but they fall asleep when they are covering a class (yes, this genuinely happened), they should not keep getting booked for supply work at that school just because they can arrive without getting caught up in traffic…
This is one of the reasons why when Ribbons & Reeves was established in 2020, the decision was made not to offer a supply service. Yes, there is a demand. There must be because there are many supply agencies that operate in the market. But is it ethical to charge schools money when you know that the quality of the candidate, that is walking through the front door is sub-standard? The simple answer is no.
This is why after four years, I was ready to hang up my supply boots and focus on long-term and permanent recruitment which is thankfully a completely different and far more positive story altogether. More to follow about that though in my next instalment….
