School: Wath Comprehensive School, Rotherham
PK Education office: South Yorkshire
Wath Comprehensive School is a co-educational secondary school on Sandygate in Wath-upon-Dearne. It currently has 998 students on roll, aged between 11-19 years old.
How long has your school been working with PK Education?
We’ve been working with PK for six years now. Our main contact is Dan from the South Yorkshire office. Dan’s fantastic, he’s absolutely brilliant. Over the years we’ve built up a very good, trusted relationship.
How important are supply teachers to the running of your school?
Although we use supply teachers fairly sporadically as we try to cover with in-house staff as much as possible, if we didn’t have supply teachers we would struggle to be able to run the school properly. We rely on supply teachers to cover classes so that our permanent members of staff can work on review days.
We hold review days three times per year for each year group and they’re designed to give parents and students one-to-one reviews with their tutors. The review days span from progress in class to career advice. Like I said, if we didn’t have any supply teachers to cover the main classes on these days we wouldn’t be able to support the students in this way.
How do you welcome supply teachers to your school?
The supply teachers come to the main reception first where they’re greeted by a member of the admin team. They then get introduced to the relevant Head of Department who is effectively their line manager for the day. Then the Head of Department will take it from there and let the supply teacher know what they’re doing for the rest of the day.
Would you consider taking on a supply teacher on as a permanent member of staff?
Definitely. We’ve previously taken on people who have initially come to us as a supply teacher for permanent roles. We always aim to employ the best person for the job whether that’s a candidate we’ve not met before or a candidate who has worked at the school previously.
Do you have any advice for supply teachers on their first day of assignments?
Be polite to everybody you meet. First impressions go a long way so, as long as you enter with a smile on your face and good manners, you’re sure to have a good day.
How do PK Education compare to other agencies?
We find that it’s best to work with a couple agencies but not for any negative reasons but just to cover ourselves. PK Education are great at doing what they do and I trust Dan to provide us with suitable candidates. Equally, I trust him to tell me if they don’t have anyone suitable to provide us with and hence why we need a back-up agency.
There’s no use them telling us we will have someone to cover the class but then ringing us back half an hour later saying they can’t sort it, we don’t just want to hear something that will make us happy there and then, we’d rather be told if they can’t help us for that day so we can sort out cover another way.
The team at PK Education are brilliant at doing that, we really trust them.
