This incredibly challenging year has presented no end of difficulties for practically everyone. One area that has felt immense pressure and a heavier workload burden, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is the Public Sector. Because of this, the HM Treasury tributes this year’s pay rise to the ‘enormous effort’ made by the public sector staff. The nearly 900,000 public sector workers including teachers, doctors, police and prison officers will see a pay increase of up to 3.1%.

• School teachers will be seeing the largest salary increase of 3.1%
• Doctors and dentists will see a 2.8% increase
• Police and prison officers will be getting 2.5% pay increase
• Armed forces personnel, senior military, senior civil servants and members of the Judiciary will be receiving a 2% pay rise

The pay awards to the armed forces, prison officers, senior civil servants and NHS staff will be backdated to April 2020, whereas the pay increase for teachers and police was to be implemented in September 2020, as they have a different pay year. The government has also revealed recruitment goals of various areas of the public sector, including 6,435 new police officers, 16,340 Regular Armed Forces recruits and an additional 12,220 nurses and health visitors for the NHS in 2020.

With social media and job board websites that are relatively cheap to access, why do so many businesses still spend thousands of pounds on recruitment? For many jobs, it makes perfect sense for the business to recruit on their own, using many of the tolls available to them, such as LinkedIn advertising or posts onto job boards, not to mention the free avenue; word of mouth. There is now such thing as cheap recruitment, thankfully, and more businesses should take advantage of this. Of course, there are cases whereby specialist help is required. This could be a particular industry or niche where you’re looking for a very specific and talented individual, and unfortunately the job boards aren’t going to cut it, especially when we start considering ‘head hunting’.

What is head hunting?

It’s a technique that’s used when there is a very defined background from which the recruiting company is looking for. It’s ideal for when someone wants a person ‘who is from a competitor’ or where that particular expertise is employed in similar, but not competitive organisations. In the case of headhunting, many of the cheap recruitment options simply won’t cut the mustard.

So, putting these recruitment situations aside what are some of the top cheap recruitment options for small businesses? One kind of recruitment that seems to be growing in popularity, especially for small firms, is flat rate recruitment. This kind of recruitment is where you pay an individual or agency a flat rate and they then dish your advert out across social media and job boards. This is a wise option for those who simply want to get their advert out there for hundreds of people to see, and if it’s a job where you know you’ll have many qualified applicants who are interested, it’s a great way to spread the word and receive plenty of CVs to go through. Some of the flat rate agencies will even filter the CVs for you and order them fro most qualified to least, so you can have almost all of the work complete by paying just a few hundred pound. This was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Of course, with LinkedIn as a business orientated social media platform, you can use the advertising feature yourself, spending just a few hundred pounds to spread the word about the opportunity available in your workplace. This can be just as cheap as flat rate recruiting, however, and to ensure your ads are optimised you’ll need to learn a little about LinkedIn ads, so perhaps choosing a social media agency or flat rate recruiter to help is a wise option.

There are of course still the tried and tested traditional methods, such as advertising your job in the local paper and nowadays these are published in print and online, so the reach is still relatively good. Adverts in local papers are often viewed with more trust than a listing on a job board, and you can choose to have candidates email their CV and cover letter over, or call you to learn more.

There are some things that one must do to become a great teacher as we are going to discuss in this blog post. To be most loved among the little children you require something beyond learning. You should be a very friendly but then a strict individual to be able to teach in a school. There are numerous approaches to be a great teacher yet the mystery lies in incredible relational abilities. It’s exceptionally fundamental that a teacher talks well. Listening is likewise another fundamental part of becoming a great teacher.

Tolerance is another key necessity that makes one a great teacher. You ought to understand that your understudy isn’t at standard with your insight and that it will require them much time to comprehend what you can comprehend in just a second. Likewise, every understudy is a quick learner. Hence you need to have tolerance with every one of them and ensure to be their top pick.

What is in a name?

It’ one’s own brand, something that you’re identified by, anytime, anywhere. Well, have you been at a hospital and noticed how nurses and doctors display their names on nameplates? This is not only merely to reveal part of their identity, but also to ensure patients know who to refer to, whilst a name and job title can ensure people know who to go to for particular purposes.

Likewise, teachers are role models to students and should show pride in their work by having their name and job title on show at any time within schools. Displaying nameplates indicates that the teachers are proud of their career and are not shy of being associated with this noble profession. It is a sign of self-confidence in teaching as a career, but of course, there’s much more to a nameplate or name tag than that. (more…)

Writing your personal statement can be stressing, we all know that. Therefore, we are going to assist you with a few tips on how to go about it.

When writing your personal statement of course you want to stand out and emerge as the best. First, log into the university’s website and learn about their core values, from there, align them to your strengths, skills and qualities. Be sure not to over do it so try to be natural and witty, not exaggerating when in comes to abilities – as one day these may be tested and no one likes a fraud!

Try to stand out. We are all different and special in our own ways, so in your statement show them that, as they are always looking for something different everyday. Make sure to proofread your statement, as the last thing you want is to hand it in with 5^th grade grammatical errors.

Some people argue that Sats are cruel because they stress young children out, damage their education and demoralise teachers. There is some truth in this and it looks as though MPs are finally talking about it seriously. Having 11 years olds going through the key stage 2 tests puts an awful lot of pressure on them, and the teachers. Some young students are spending all of their free time preparing for the tests but getting not a lot from it. Too much education and pressure at such a young age can have the opposite effect which many parents argue is the case. It can make students become bored and anxious, and MPs are finally waking up to the fact that Sats are all about the school and nothing to do with the pupils. Hopefully Sats will be completely removed in the next few years as media coverage grows around the issue.

Whether you’re a teacher looking to update your advice for revision, or a student looking to improve your process, one of the best ways to start improving your revision time is to look at the findings of Psychologists. This is because psychologists spend their time researching how the brain works, including how the processes of learning and memorisation, and therefore revision, works.

Research can tell us a lot about the ways in which revision isn’t as effective as it perhaps should be for certain people. For instance, 27% of boys and 39% of girl skip breakfast, and this is in spite of the wealth of evidence indicating its importance for mental activities throughout the rest of the day.

Another big reason why we aren’t necessarily having as successful revision sessions as most people would have 30 or 40 years ago is because we have a lot more distractions available now. Information and entertainment is available at your fingertips throughout the day, no matter where you are, and this is clearly a double-edged sword when you’re trying to learn a subject.

Doing your revision in a mad rush in the day or days running up to crunch time is also ill-advised. Evidence shows that repeatedly reinforcing information over long stretches of time is the most effective learning method; it also means that you are able to take a generally more relaxed approach to revision; spending just a couple of hours every couple of days going over your material.

Surprisingly, teaching is actually one of the most effective ways of improving your understanding of a subject. In psychological circles, the affect of this is known as the “protege effect”, and it can be a massive help for reinforcing recently learned information.

Last of all, and perhaps most importantly, is to remember to get adequate sleep. Without enough sleep humans can quickly lose a lot of the attention span, and thereby limit the productivity of any time they spend revising, so make sure that you get your 7-8 hours a day!

A big part in the efforts against gender inequality isn’t to do with getting people the same wage for the same job (although there is of course that too),  but is actually to do with getting girls more interested in careers where the earning potential is generally higher than other careers. In the case of STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and mathematics’ studies – girls have for a long time been unengaged and uninterested in studying these subjects and pursuing them at higher levels.

Before we can discuss how to get girls more interested in these subjects, to the point that entries into careers which require qualifications in them are more gender-equal, we first need to understand the dynamics involved in why girls react in the way they do. Most studies point towards a few different factors for why this is the case:

• A lack of role models – Most famous people who’ve become famous due to scientific, pioneering work, have been male. The fact that, historically, scientific discovery has been so unequal in terms of gender is discouraging for many; it is a big part of how people form expectations of what they can achieve and what others expect from them.
• Male dominated industry – Starting to work in an industry, for a company that is dominated by males, both in positions of authority and among their peers, is something that people can find intimidating. This principle works both ways; men working in female dominated industries often encounter a bit of a barrier between themselves and everyone else.
• A lack of encouragement from authority figures – In the same way that a lack of role models influences women negatively in terms of their interest in STEM subjects, the principle behind this also influences those in authority figures, both consciously and subconsciously; the whole world overtly and subliminally reinforces stereotypes in everyone of us, and whether you consciously or subconsciously observe these stereotypes, they can impact the behaviour you encourage and discourage, and the lack of understanding of this principle among many authority figures can also be a factor in the uptake of STEM subjects.

Once you understand what these mean regarding the international efforts by school boards to encourage girls to take on STEM subjects, it becomes clear that, in order to buck the trend, creating a positive view will require the teaching community and parents generally to enforce positive views on STEM. In practice, this will require teachers to make a conscious attempt to react positively to young girls’ interests in the sciences, and to try to maintain that positivity throughout their academic life.

Implementing these changes could potentially be a problem. It can be difficult to change how an entire society functions, particularly when many people expect it to change overnight, but everything needs to start somewhere. It looks like the best place to start trying to get people and young girls in particular to change their views on STEM subjects is to make sure that teachers treat their students equally, regardless of their gender.

An interesting new scheme has come out of Ontario, with the potential to spread across the nation and the world, which is to merge childcare facilities and schools together. This has been considered and agreed upon with the assumption that allowing the children some sense of continuity, during the switch from child-care to kindergarten, could help with their adjustment to their life in education. Already we’ve seen how places in the UK and USA are considering to adopt similar strategies.

One of the principle reasons for why this new strategy is being undertaken is because of the massive increase in demand for childcare. As more and more families are having to make the decision at early periods in their child’s lives to return to work, the demand for childcare has of course increased.

Having childcare facilities in schools is helpful for children’s development, but it is also useful for teachers too, because they will be able to rely upon close childcare for their own children. Many large businesses and corporations already provide these types of services for their staff, but this is the first time schools have effectively done the same thing.

Deciding upon where to study for higher education is, for many young adults, the most important decision they’ve ever made. It is at the very least a stressful decision because of this, but in addition it is made difficult by the number of competing University rankings’ lists which are produced every year.

University Rankings

Looking at rankings can give you a false impression of which university is actually the best or among the best in the world. This is mainly because many of the organisations who produce these rankings use highly subjective data. The one considered to be the most objective is usually the Shanghai rankings, which, although more objective than others, is still skewed towards the success in hard sciences.

Often times, it is better to look at other rankings, such as the rankings of student satisfaction, or employability, and then decide depending upon which aspect of your schooling you consider most important.