Who to talk to science lead or head teacher?

[LCM001a]

Hello

I’m a researcher at a London University and my colleagues and I are setting up a patient public involvement group (PPI) with primary school teachers about some research we are looking to carry out around obesity with a focus on KS1.

Our plan is to email teachers, possibly science leads, directly to ask if they are interested (there’s likely to be a thank you voucher paid).

My question is, given that we are going to hold these outside of school hours, would your Head Teacher expect to be contacted first or could we recruit the teachers directly?

my worry is that the HT would act as gatekeepers and we may not get access to the people who may actually want to take part.

what do you think? How would it work in your school?

The headteacher can't direct staff to work outside of their directed time. They would be extremely unlikely to prioritize this for directed time.

Therefore, this will be the sort of thing that individual teachers will either choose to take part in, or not. You would be best contacting them directly. However, I'm not sure how you would get contact details.

Are you aware that there’s a recruitment and retention crisis in teaching at the moment? A large part of this is due to a ridiculously high workload. I can see that you are genuinely trying to accommodate teachers but considering the fact that most teachers work 60+ hours a week and many have their own family commitments, I seriously doubt you’d get many volunteers. You might be better rethinking your way of gathering the data you need.

A way in may be to involve your local initial teacher training university.