Flexible Working Toolkit
Flexible Working Toolkit
Toolkit collated by Hannah Wilson with Lindsay Patience
What Is Flexible Working?
- Flexible working is a way of working that suits an employee’s needs, for example having flexible start and finish times, or working from home. (https://www.gov.uk/flexible-working)
There is a range of ways that teachers can consider working flexibly:
- Part time working – the most common form of flexible working across all professions, including teaching. Usually characterized by working less than fulltime hours and/or working fewer days;
- Job sharing - two or more people do one job and split the hours. Increasingly popular option for teachers and schools, particularly where individual teachers are able to organize and propose their own job-sharing arrangements;
- Compressed hours - working full-time hours but over fewer days. A useful option when it may not be financially convenient for a teacher to take on a reduced number of hours. However, can have increased workload implications for the reduced number of days that an individual teacher does work;
- Staggered hours - the employee has different start, finish and break times from other workers (this would be dependent on each individual application and situation). Useful for teachers with caring/childcare responsibilities who may need to drop off or collect children but who don’t want or need to work less than five days a week.
- Remote working - there are other forms of part-time work, such as working from home, that are increasingly popular in other professions, but which don’t lend themselves so easily to teaching. However, while regular home-working may not be practical for most teachers in most schools, there are many schools which do offer ad hoc working from home opportunities where appropriate.
The Diverse Educators’ Flexible Working Toolkit
We are collating a growing bank of resources to support you in reflecting on the following questions:
- How can we recruit more teachers through flexible working?
- How can we retain more teachers through flexible working?
- How can we reengage more teachers through flexible working?
- How can we change perspectives on flexible working?
- How can we create school cultures and ethos to enable flexible working?
- How can flexible working improve diversity and equality in our schools?