What’s Inside – Resources for Leaders
Monday 9th June, 2025
We recently shared our toolkit to support teacher recruitment and retention with all schools in North Birmingham. In this series of blog posts we will be sharing this summer, we dive deeper into some of the sections of the toolkit. Our aim is to support schools to engage with and utilse the resources from the toolkit, and signpost some of the powerful content available to you.
Section in Focus:
This section includes several practical tools for senior leaders. You can also access a wide range of supportive resources, guides and read examples of success stories from other schools.
There are four strands to this section of the toolkit:
- Resources and Tools for Leaders – more on this later…
- Information about routes into teaching – a range of resources to help you navigate the landscape of teacher training in England.
- Collated DFE resources and Links – we’ve pulled together some of the most helpful resources from DFE to save you time and clicks.
- Step Into Teaching Partnerships – partner with an organisation that recruits high-quality graduates into schools, ready to develop their teaching career.
Jump to a strand now:
All links open in a new tab.
Deep Dive: Resources and Tools for Leaders
For this article, we’re going to focus in on a couple of key features – our audit tool and support around innovative approaches schools are taking to recruit high-quality colleagues.
Audit Tool
The most powerful tool in this strand is our custom-built audit tool.
The audit tool supports leaders to assess their school’s current offer, identify gaps in provision and suggests which sections of the toolkit might be most useful for you to consider in greater detail.
Built around DFE’s recommendations and a range of evidence around effective recruitment, the audit tool is the key to geting the most out of the toolkit. It is also a powerful self-assessment tool for schools and leaders to establish a clear picture of the current reality in their school.
It only takes about five minutes to complete and as you work your way through the audit it will make suggestions of areas of the toolkit that are relevant, based on your responses. These suggestions appear as links that open the resources in new tabs, so you don’t lose your place in the audit.
Once you get to the end of the audit and click submit, you’ll get an email with all your responses and suggestions, so you can come back to the resources you want at a time to suit you.
You can also select options for further support from the TSH at the end of the audit, if your school wants to talk things through with a member of our team.
Complete the audit today to start your journey!
Innovative Approaches Resources
It’s always valuable to learn from the experiences of other schools and leaders. In the ‘Innovative Approaches’ section there are two key resources to support you and potentially expose you to thinking, practice and policy that are outside of the tried and tested.
Snapshot Case Studies
We have collated a series of very brief examples from across the country. These 1-2 minute reads capture the essence of what schools have done to improve recruitment and increase retention.
These snapshots are designed to give you a bit of inspiration, and showcase what schools are telling us has worked for them.
Innovative Approaches Reading List
This section includes a range of articles from sources across the sector, exploring emerging evidence and suggested approaches to recruitment and retention. We add articles to the page as they are published and come to our attention, so it’s worth checking back each term.
What next?
Thanks for reading! In our next blog in the series, we’ll be exploring the testimonials and case studies you can find in our Good News Stories section. Look out for our post in the next couple of weeks.
What is the toolkit for?
We want to help you and your school attract and retain the best possible teachers, and to maximise the resources in your school.
We want to support schools with recruitment by supporting effective communication, supporting collaborative partnerships and by driving engagement with teacher training and ongoing professional development, across North Birmingham.
As part of our strategic role to support all teacher training across North Birmingham, we have collaborated with Teaching School Hubs, ITT Providers and schools across the West Midlands to develop a bank of resources to support schools with the recruitment of new staff and retention of existing colleagues.
We believe that teacher training is vital to sustainable recruitment.
