It’s a Monday morning and one of Sarah’s best teachers has just handed in her notice. Although the teacher loves her current school, she says she is keen to climb the career ladder and has been offered a middle leadership position elsewhere. Sarah is frustrated: if there had been a similar position going at her own school, the teacher would have been perfect. But Sarah is glad, too, that she didn’t spend lots of time and money training the teacher up only for her to go elsewhere to use those skills.

The latter feeling is entirely natural yet, according to the research, it is wrong-headed: if that training had been in place, it is likely the teacher would have stayed whether there was an opening at her current school or not. Career development is a key part of talent management and a huge focus in the corporate sector to aid retention, but can such programmes work in schools?

In business, it is now standard practice that the best staff are selected and then equipped with the time and resources to better themselves professionally, says occupational psychologist Richard Ogden.

“Talent management has never been so important,” he argues. “With the pandemic, Brexit and other business challenges, companies are finding it very hard to recruit labour and they have to see their employees as customers: how can they add value to their lives and hold on to them? When people make choices about joining an organisation, they think about long-term prospects and development.”

Ogden suggests a six-step plan for effective talent management. The first step, he says, is to really understand your organisation, what your mission is and what you want the talent programme to achieve.

For schools, this is easy to do, says Sue Parker, executive headteacher at The Diocese of Worcester Multi-Academy Trust. “Every school will have a development plan and you can set targets for staff to support that,” she says.

The second step is identifying people. “It’s not about a tap on the shoulder and a secret development process,” says Ogden. “Be transparent and invite everyone to apply. Some may need encouragement but others will self-nominate,” he says.

“Apply” is the key word here. Ogden suggests a multiple-step application process, in which staff are required to demonstrate their worth to the programme and commitment to the organisation.

This step, Parker says, isn’t so transferable to schools. “Some schools may only have five members of teaching staff - and if everyone applies, then that’s the whole school in the programme. Equally, teachers don’t have the time to fill out a huge application - even a job application can take days - and leaders don’t have the time to sift through that either.”

However, Parker says teachers are good at self-nomination - and suggests that conversations about joining the talent management programme occur in performance management meetings throughout the year.

Give staff a target

Designing the process comes next. An individual programme will normally last between a year and 18 months, and each staff member should have a personal development plan with live targets, says Ogden. He recommends a 70/20/10 structure: 70 per cent of time is spent on a self-directed project, 20 per cent is with a mentor or getting feedback and 10 per cent is formal training.

Parker thinks this structure would “work well”, as all staff have performance management plans already in place.

“Projects could focus on improvements needed in school. For example, to roll out the new RSE (relationships and sex education) curriculum or take charge of the maths hub work. Mentors could be senior leaders who work with those teachers anyway, and the formal training could be conferences or other external CPD (continuing professional development) opportunities,” she explains.

Step four is implementation - and this is all about business culture, says Ogden.

“Engaging all the leaders in the business is crucial. Otherwise, you invest lots of money into people and then managers aren’t flexible about time off to develop,” he says.

Having leadership buy-in would be critical to making this work in schools, too, says Parker but, ultimately, that might not be enough. “There are cost implications: if you’ve got a member of staff who is having time out for development, their class needs cover and that person needs to be paid. For schools where budgets are really tight, they might not be able to afford that,” she says.

Active participation from management is the fifth stage. Ogden says that there must be dedicated time for mentoring and coaching, and suggests that managers should be spending 50 per cent of their time with their staff.

In schools, senior leaders spend a huge amount of time coaching and mentoring their staff already, says Parker. “Staff are your most important resource, and leaders do spend a lot of time coaching and observing them. Ideally, as the headteacher, you should be helping teachers to be the best that they can be.”

‘Get creative about job design’

Evaluation is the final stage: staff should reflect on their targets, achievements, and look to formally utilise their new skills with either an extension of responsibilities or promotion, says Ogden: “If there aren’t any opportunities immediately obvious, leaders need to get creative about job design.”

In big multi-academy trusts - where teachers can move to higher roles at other schools within the trust - this could work, says Parker, but adding extra workload within current roles should be avoided. “Many classroom teachers already have extra responsibilities on top of what they’re doing: head of subject roles, for example. So adding something else to that - people just don’t have the capacity,” she says.

It’s not a perfect transfer from the corporate world to education, then, but there are certainly things that could work in both sectors. And Parker is clear that something needs to be done: all schools need to develop their staff or risk losing them. “There’s no reason why leaders can’t look at everyone: from lunchtime supervisors right up to senior leadership, whether it’s a small school, a big school or an academy, and identify how staff can progress. If you don’t, they’ll leave,” she says.

But for this approach to truly work for teachers, government investment is needed, she says: “If there was more money available to cover the cost of staff development, it would make all the difference.”

Kate Parker is schools and colleges content producer at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 17 September 2021 issue under the headline “Don’t let your ‘talent’ go to waste”