ROISIN!!! Are you about? I have a question for you.

[MaureenMLove]

That's it really!

What I want to know is how long you cover sickness for a particular member of staff, before a specialist subject teacher is employed/hire for supply?

We seem to be having a hard time in Science, Maths and MFL at the moment and I have today worked out that we are covering 63 lessons on an alarmingly regular basis! That's 63 lessons per week, before the phone rings in the morning!!

Bumping for you.

I think it's three days - but schools need to be getting ready for the minimal / no cover rule that comes in in Sept 2009 - and that doesn't sound like it's happening at your establishment!

Oh Puzzlerocks, you're busy bumping today, aren't you! Well done and thanks!

I didn't know about that rule Pluto! Good to hear though. I will mention it to my boss tomorrow, I'm sure he knows.

I've only been in charge of Cover since October, so a lot of it is new to me. The school has only been using C.S's since April last year too, so its a bit like the blind leading the blind!

One of my CS's has been covering the same teacher in Maths for months! It's disgusting really, the poor kids need a proper maths teacher. The work is all set and she delievers it well enough, but it's just not right. If my DD was in this situation, I'd go mental.

Yep, it started as a wish to see no post go unanswered but now I think it's just OCD.

Maureen - are you a cover teacher based in a school? In that case, I don't think the three day rule applies. You are right though: it's really unfair when pupils go for weeks and weeks without a specialist teacher. If that is the case, then the HoD should be arranging lesson swaps, regroupings etc within the dept.

Sorry - I'm here now.
Generally CS cover for up to 3 days of absence. Occasionally (if cover is light elsewhere ie seldom) this can be bent for subjects such as RE or art where most students only have 1 lesson a week.

But even then we always query it, to make sure it doesn't continue. (On Monday I was covering for the 5th day of absence for an RE teacher and queried it with the cover administrator and she sorted it for the next day.)

Generally we are very well-respected and do a good job, but we are not teachers, and it's unfair on the students for them not to have qualified teachers and consistent/regular teachers for any significant length of time.

After the 3 days school (cover administrator with input from HoD) will try and find a subject specialist to step in. Sometimes they can't find a specialist, but they will always then use a qualified supply teacher rather than a C/S at that point.

If they didn't stick to this rule, my school could employ more C/S and have a smaller supply bill; but it's not in anybody's best interests.

One of the big problems that can arise would be lack of continuity. Now for some subjects I could do a pretty good job even for a couple of weeks with some classes. But that's not the job I'm paid for, it's not what unions agreed to, and most people in my role would not be able to do this.

Also the way our system works is we 'fill in the gaps', so our timetables have to be flexible: we couldn't cope as we do if we had regular commitments to classes needing cover for extended absences.

Anyway, that's the way it works at our place.

How big is your school and how many CS?
We have c.1000 students and 5 CS.

We are a BIG school! We have around 2,500 students and at the moment 7 CS's! We need more!!

I'm not sure we're doing it right tbh. Thing is, as you may remember, I was the first CS they employed back in April last year and we have finally managed to get 6 more to stay!

We are all supposed to be assigned to a department, apart from me actually. I pick up the odd one offs, because I have other responsiblities to deal with. Trouble is, because it's taken so long to get the team together, they all need the same training and it just isn't happening, because there are too many classes that need covering, so the training has to wait. I'm phoning for supply every day, but the finance department are always moaning we're spending too much money! It's a never ending circle!

I have to sit my boss down tomorrow, if there's time and get this sorted. It's just not right for the kids. Senior staff are going to have to pick up some covers, I think. Do your senior staff willing help out?

We've got a History teacher that's been out since I started and we still cover some of her lessons! It's only 2 a week, but yr7 kids have yet to have a real teacher! The cover work is fantastic. All interactive and yr 7 history is easy to deliever, but it's frankly discusting that we are doing it! Academic day is next week and kids are asking the CS's for appointments!

I'm gonna get this sorted. I'm begining to think, my girls shouldn't just do as I, via my boss, asks. It's not right. I'm going to kick up a storm I think!

The thing is you are still in transition from not having CS to having them/using them well. In that transition SMT have to accept that there will continue to be significant additional costs for supply staff, or that staff will have to do cover.

There is no point appointing more CS until you get the concept working properly in your school.

Training the CS you have should be a priority for the school.

How much cover do your C/S do?
We have a 5 1-hr lessons per day, and theoretically C/S only do a maximum of 15 a week. (We sometimes do a few extra, but not many). We also have admin responsibilities in our department.

At my place staff do very little cover - maybe 2 a year maximum. These are only done in case of emergency - ie when someone has gone home sick during the day. Our SMT do help out when there's a crisis, but generally staff are less and less willing to do any cover at all, and more and more aggrieved if they have to do even one, as they don't see that as their role any longer.

I've just managed to agree with our SLT that CS do a maximum of 4 lessons out of 5 a day, since they have to have time to input reports on various lessons! We have a 5 lesson school day.

The plan according to the powers that be, is that each CS is attached to a department and when they are not needed for cover, they assist or take intervention groups.

I raised your points today, with my boss and he asked me to do a complete spreadsheet on what/where we cover every day. The final count of covers I know we have to do next week, before the phone rings, is 98.

One of the girls in Maths told me today, that they'd asked her to be available for 25 covers a week! That is a week!! This same girl nearly walked out today, as she had a SEN group of Yr8's with no TA and not one member of the department even dropped in to see if she was OK! I have already told my boss, that we will not cover SEN groups alone again. SLT will have to do it. Its not on.

We have an academic day next week and we have an hour to ourselves, so I'll be making sure we make our feelings properly known and action is taken.

I don't think more CS is the right move yet either. We need to get supply staff in to cover long term staff and we might just have time to slot ourselves in, where we can do the best job.

Thankfully, we are a good team and whenever someone has a free lesson, they immediately ask everyone else, if they need support. We'll get it right in the end, but I think it's gonna take til at least the end of the academic year!

Sorry to ramble away, but you know what its like, DH isn't that interested!

Hmm
I wouldn't want to do a job which was just cover - i.e. 20 lessons of cover a week, plus running round sorting out the problems - it's just not rewarding enough.

Also, financially, if staff are prepared to do that amount of cover for the pay they get, there is no incentive for schools to use supply staff ever! Our supply staff do 5 covers a day, or 25 a week: that's one of the reasons they are paid more than us. (Repeatedly we have staff requesting that we/I cover lessons rather than supply staff, which is encouraging, but it doesn't mean I'm prepared to do 5 a day.)

Initially our school envisaged us doing more, and for the first term I was averaging 19 covers a week, but it just wasn't working out: you just end up lurching from one crisis to another sometimes!

Now that we generally do 3 covers a day, we also have time to sort out any problems and follow up any issues and have time to support our departments in admin roles and so on.

Our school has a heavy week next week as there is a ski trip out, which involves about 4 members of full-time teaching staff (plus some others). But that won't impact significantly on my role: I will still do around 15, and we will use supply staff to pick up the slack.

Have you analysed the 98 covers? Are they all illness? Or are there meetings and courses and so on. One thing our school has had to do, and others have as well, is to become stricter on the procedures for requesting cover.

In the past in some schools there was:
'legitimate cover' - you were ill or on a course,
and then there was 'other cover' - you wanted to go and see your dd in school play, or you had to see a parent.

The former was covered by an official cover system, but the latter was usually done on a tit-for-tat informal basis with colleagues in your department.

With the advent of CS in some schools the second category rapidly moves into the first category, especially if the introduction of CS also coincides with cover requests being handled by a far less senior member of staff. And before you know it the whole system has spiralled out of control and everyone is requesting cover left, right and centre for all sorts of spurious reasons.

How does it function at your place re setting work? Who provides the work for the cover lessons and how does it get to the classroom?

We are aiming for exactly the same as your school Roisin. A lot of the 98 covers we have are due to long term sickness. One teacher actually walked out yesterday and left us with a 18 lesson week and another one left today leaving 20. The department head for the later one, came to me and said, 'we've tried to share them out, but we can't, so we want X to do them!' (I have a supply teacher coming on Monday morning!

Cover work is sent to the HOF, by e-mail and the majority of the time, its good. Left selotaped to the desk or saved in the Cover file on PC. There are obviously the odd occassions when there's nothing there, but if you are in the department you are attached to, you can muddle through or just turn to the HOF.

HR and Head are really craking down on reasons for absence. Staff have to leave me a message with as much info as possible or call the HR dept direct. I have to report all ailments to the Head on a daily basis.

TBH, I've sent the list of covers to the Head today and she is excellent and very much in favour of us getting a good deal. I am fairly confident she'll get it sorted. The thing is, we were just going along with what we were given and it wasn't until I actually got it on paper, I realised how bad it was. Now the Head is involved, she'll realise it can't go on.

Thanks for all your help! It really helps to know how a good CS department works, so that we can get this one right! Before we had these extra teachers leave/go off sick, we were making good progress. I guess you have to have these set backs, to realise you have to change things!

I did a lot of supply before I got the job I have now. I settled into a single school, and took as much work as they offered me.

This was a large school (1500 students) with about five CS (maybe 3 FTE). I think they covered for 4/5 lessons a day, with the non-cover being taken up as admin (they were assistant heads-of-year, so were often tallying housepoints, unexplained absenses etc). I was the first supply on-call, so got called almost every day (cha ching!). Every so often there were one or two other supply teachers in, but mostly it was just me. The regular teaching staff did their share of cover (1 lesson per week).

I got on well with the cover staff, but always felt a bit uneasy in that I was getting paid twice their rate, and working almost every day. They had much better continuity that me in that they had been in school for more than the few months I was there, so knew the pupils really well. Apart from my specialist subject, I didn't really see where it made a huge difference being qualified. I was prepared to alter lesson plans left by the teacher if I thought that it would work better, but I'm pretty sure a CS would do that too. I always figured that lesson plans were left for a teacher who had marking to do, so had to be for minimal teacher input - that wasn't the role I had - I was there to work with the pupils and attempt to advance their education.

What do you feel a qualified supply teacher who is not a subject specialist can do that you can't? From the children's point of view, are they getting a worse deal having you as their teacher, rather than a qualified fly-by-night?

I agree completely! Having a qualified teacher in front of them, is a much better deal than having us lot! As a mother, I'd be bloody furious to find my DD has had someone who has no teaching qualifications doing lessons all term. That is happening in our school. There is one yr7 humanties group, that have never had a teacher. They have been asking my CS this week, if they can have an appointment with her for academic day! Disgusting!

I wouldn't worry about the financial aspect of it though. If I have a supply teacher in and it's the difference between them having a full day and a CS having only 2 lessons - I give it to the supply every time! We never have a problem with them getting more money!

Where have your CS come from? What sort of experience do they have? Are the cover lessons generally good quality and good behaviour management, or are there issues?

I am really shocked at you still covering longterm sickness. The unions in our place would be up-in-arms about that sort of thing: it's just not what was agreed in the workforce remodelling.

We don't have a great deal of longterm sickness, but when we do it is covered by supply staff (after the first 3-5 days).

At my school the 5 CS between us can 'legitimately' do 75 covers a week. There are usually only 1 or 2 quieter weeks in each term when we don't do our full quota and that's in a school much smaller than yours. On top of that we have regular supply teachers in most weeks to help with heavy cover or longterm sickness.

We are all from different job backgrounds Roisin. None of us had formal training in schools at all before we arrived!

We have had and continue to get training though. We've done the usual behaviour management, delivery of lessons, child protection to name but a few. We have a 'man^ come in once a month, to cover anything we feel is necessary at that time.

I'm going to raise lots of points on Wednesday, when we have a training day!! It may be time to contact the Union too!

3 days in our school. Insurance scheme kicks in after this to pay for outside supply staff. Thought this was what happened everywhere.

Sometimes cs, may be used during the absence after 3 days, but only for the odd lesson, external supply always comes in though

I really need to go and see the CS and the department at the school that is part of the same trust as us, I think! I knew nothing about insurance and the like! This is really bad.

I was so thrown into this job, as was my boss and we know nothing. Well, maybe he does, but he's keeping this information close to his chest!

I think I'm going to start throwing my weight around and making myself known. If they want this to work it's got to be done properly. I can do it and I'm happy to do so, but I'll have to be strong, I think.

Thank you all so much for you help!

The insurance which kicks in after 3 days that fizzbuzz mentions is a voluntary thing, I understand. Some schools choose to 'self-insure'. It depends on how big they are, and the circumstances.

btw Who covers the lessons when you're having training?

We do it one or two at a time. The guy comes in all day and does various things, with various staff. He fits in around our covers.

MaureenMLove - have you had any progress on these issues?