Let’s hear it for support staff – the unsung heroes who keep schools going

We would do well to remember the canteen staff, the receptionists and the cleaners who will be battling to keep schools open in the next few weeks, writes Ed Dorrell

There are 250,000 support staff in England’s schools, a number that rises to 450,000 if you include teaching assistants (John Lawrence)

If you want to get a really good sense of a school, talk to the receptionist before you speak to anyone else. If they’re happy, welcoming and organised, then you’re likely visiting a place where the kids and the teachers are getting along pretty well in the classroom, too.

This is one of the things I learnt from nearly a decade and a half visiting schools as a journalist. Similarly, if you get a chance to speak to them, the caretakers and lunchtime supervisors normally have a pretty good idea if the head is doing a good job.

The reason their insight is often reliable is because support staff are the glue that holds a school together. Without their invaluable work – and their collective institutional memory – a school can quickly come unstuck.

It is worth remembering that there are 250,000 support staff in England’s schools, a number that rises to 450,000 if you include teaching assistants. This is only marginally less than the total teaching workforce. They often stick at a school for much longer than their teaching colleagues – and really know its ins and outs.

Ministers and education sector leaders would do well to keep this stat in mind as they try to keep the education show on the road through the madness of the next few weeks with thousands of teachers and their colleagues disappearing off for bouts of Covid and isolation.

What to do when teaching staff look down and see the dreaded double red line on their lateral flow test has been reasonably widely discussed. Indeed, the Department for Education published guidance at the end of last week suggesting that smaller subjects – PSHE, Art and others – might have to be temporarily abandoned to allow for their teachers to be redeployed to English, Maths and the rest of the core.

But what about the other part of the school workforce? As one school leader put it to me the other day: “I think we’ll survive the teachers going off with Covid, but what about the chap who is the only person in the school who knows how to plug the oojimaflib into the thingamijig. Without him, we’re in big trouble.”

Of course, there are those who get this. Unison, the union that represents many support staff, does. Assistant general secretary Jon Richards put it like this last year: “Catering staff are mixing with loads of pupils, and you see higher rates of infection amongst those groups, because they have high-risk groups, like older workers, Bame [black, Asian and/or minority ethnic] workers, those who live in multi-generational environments.

“Whenever we meet with scientists, it’s always about teachers. So I’m the pain in the butt who always asks: ‘What about support staff?’”

Richards’ comments remind me of a quote that has often been referenced on Twitter in the last year or two – but that is hard to attribute. It’s something like: “Lockdown is where middle-class people hide and working-class people bring them stuff.”

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment, sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

It is worth noting most teachers didn’t hide over the course of the pandemic either – many were heroic in their efforts to keep schools open for children of key workers or those that were vulnerable while also organising remote teachings – but the quote still speaks to a fundamental truth of the Covid experience.

We have undervalued “unglamorous” workers for too long. It was the supermarket workers, the delivery drivers and the rest who kept the country going – and this is as true in schools as anywhere else.

So here’s to the canteen staff, the receptionists and the cleaners who will be battling to keep schools open in the next few weeks – and all too often will be missing from the national roll of honour.

Ed Dorrell is a director at Public First