Apparently, there’s more to come from the Department for Education’s recruitment and retention strategy, and thank goodness for that, because the trail of its “job share match.com” style set-up at the end of last week is a long way from solving the current problems in the profession.

Let me set out my stall first of all: I think job shares can be really effective, especially in primary schools where two heads are most definitely better than one when it comes to the broad spread of the curriculum. If I could find the right person, who would happily teach RE, PE and art every week, but who would let me keep all the history, I’d be delighted.

In fact, once, many years ago, another full-time teacher and I discussed the potential of sharing two classes between us to make the best use of our strengths. I would teach English, history, ICT and a few other subjects; she would take maths and pretty much anything that required any manual dexterity. Sadly it never came off, but I still wish we’d had the chance to try it out.

Job-share teachers must be compatible

The trouble is, it’s not the sort of thing that’s easily sorted on paper. An online matching service might do well to match up teachers who want to teach opposite halves of the week, who both have expertise in the same age range, who can both travel to a mutually accessible location and who have a good range of subject expertise. But just like real dating sites, the easy algorithm stuff is not enough.

In both primary and secondary schools, if you’re expecting teachers to jointly share a class, then you need to know that they’ll be sufficiently compatible. Just as a shared love of sky-diving won’t make for a perfect couple if one party can’t bear the other’s love of jazz music, so it is that one teacher’s well-managed classroom would be a colleague’s idea of regimented hell.

That’s not to say that the idea shouldn’t be tried; just that it won’t be enough. It’ll take more than a handy formula for matching candidates on paper to persuade the average headteacher that a partnership is the right choice.

If only we were serious about solving the issues, we might actually find that fewer job shares were needed anyway. I’ve written before about the demand for part-time work being a result of excessive workload. If we really want to retain teachers into their thirties, then we need to look practically at why so many feel the need to reduce their hours.

How about tackling workload?

What if, instead of finding job share partners, we funded schools well enough to increase PPA time? Rather than hoping you can match up the right pair of teachers, we instead have specialists tackling subjects like music, PE and MFL, and free up classroom teachers to ensure that their lessons are planned and assessed within a reasonable time during the school day.

Too many of our part-time teachers are working fewer days in school so that they can complete the additional workload during the day on their supposed days off. Only then can they spend the important time they need with their families at the end of the school day.

A shift in how we support teachers to complete their work in school hours might also reduce the number of parents feeling guilty for making arrangements to pick their children up from school once or twice a week.

And while we’re on it, maybe we could make childcare more affordable so that teachers - particularly those in the earlier stages of their career - found it worthwhile to return to work in the first place.

But in the meantime, I’m sure swiping left - or is it right? 

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979