How does your secondary school work, when there's someone off long time.

[MaureenMLove]

Long term, I mean a month or two.

I'm the one who tries everyday to cover all the lessons for absent staff with a team of cover supervisors. I say 'team' there are only 4 of them and we have a teaching staff of over 100, so not that many really!

We've had so much sickness this year already and I've just been informed of the 5th(!) long term sickness. We have the potential to not be back to full strength this side of Christmas.

At what point to do turn to agency staff? How do absences work in your school?

If you know someone is going to be off long term then agency staff. The problem comes when someone hands in a doctors note every couple of weeks because it takes a while to recruit through an agency and if you’re expecting the member of staff back then you don’t get the agency staff in.

So it depends. Sounds a difficult situation.

Long term we get agency staff in.
Our cover supervisors are for day to day self certify stuff and courses usually.

The issue our cover person says is when it's a rolling fortnight sick note. It's sometimes easier if someone is off for an operation for 6 weeks.