Staff Deployment

Effective management and deployment of support staff

Effective management of support staff depends on a set of basic systems being in place. Ruth Bradbury looks at how to build teams, define roles and establish effective performance management

In most schools, the role of the business manager includes responsibility for the management of a wide range of support staff. Since the advent of workforce remodelling, however, support staff teams have grown at a rapid rate, sometimes even equalling or exceeding teaching staff numbers. Accompanying the growth in numbers has come a significant increase in the range and variety of roles: whereas 10 years ago school support staff would probably have consisted of the office/admin function, the caretaker and a few technicians, the team could now include roles such as data managers, learning mentors, cover supervisors and network managers, to name but a few.

Unless it is planned and managed appropriately, this rapid increase in numbers and roles could easily result in a vague and chaotic structure (or lack of it) where reporting lines are blurred and where staff are not appropriately managed or supported. Schools can be notoriously complex anyway in this respect – after all, there aren’t many organisations where you can line manage a person in one aspect of your role and be line managed by them in another. In addition, while teachers do, of course, belong to departmental teams, a lot of their day-to-day work takes place in isolation from other staff and they are used to being independent and self-managing to a large degree.

In comparison support staff, especially those recruited from outside of the education sector, may expect and require more guidance and support than headteachers and other senior leaders realise.

In this article, then, I will offer some suggestions and practical guidance for what I regard as the basic elements which need to be in place to ensure effective support staff management in a modern...