This research, conducted by the National Foundation for Educational Research and commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation, explored the nature, prevalence, and impact of teachers’ flexible working in schools. The review explores the nature and prevalence of flexible working for teachers since the Covid-19 pandemic, identifies examples of promising flexible working practices, and considers indicators of impact.
Overall, there is a lack of robust evidence on the impacts of flexible working yet considerable perceptual evidence that flexible working can support recruitment, retention, and workforce stability. There is also perceptual evidence that suggests flexible working could contribute positively to:
- wellbeing and job satisfaction;
- attendance, productivity, and motivation;
- capacity, expertise, and diversity; and
- career progression, succession planning, and reducing the gender pay gap.
However, school leaders also report negative impacts in terms of increased costs and concerns around lack of consistency for pupils. Overall, there is very limited evidence on the differential impacts of flexible working. However, there are indications that disadvantaged schools may have less positive perceptions of flexible working and be less likely to adopt such working practices. Also, flexible working is more common among female and primary school teachers and some forms of flexible working appear to be more appealing and beneficial to different groups of teachers and at different stages of their lives.
The main type of flexible working in schools is part-time working, although a minority of teachers work flexibly in other ways including phased retirement, flexible hours, personal days, and remote working. Flexible working is more common among primary teachers than secondary and appears to be less common in schools serving more disadvantaged communities. There appears to be a higher level of interest in flexible working among teachers than is reflected in teacher job adverts.
There are numerous challenges to flexible working—including leadership attitudes and school culture, timetabling, financial costs, staff availability, and workload—yet successful flexible working approaches can be enabled by supportive leadership and culture, a whole-school, proactive approach, effective communication, fairness, and transparency, creative timetabling, clear and accessible policies, managing and defining responsibilities and workload, and access to training, tools, and guidance. Leadership and creating a school culture that values staff and prioritises staff wellbeing emerged as being crucial to successful flexible working practices, and underpinned the other factors.