An ICSE school runs a wide syllabus with heavy internal assessment, project work and language teaching. Its teachers carry long marking loads and its academic calendar leaves little room for staff gaps during exam months.
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Share your requirementsAn ICSE school usually offers a broad curriculum, with English taught at depth, several languages, science and humanities taught as separate subjects, and a good deal of project work, practicals and internal assessment. That shapes the staffroom. A Class 9 history teacher may mark long written answers every week, a chemistry teacher runs practical batches in the lab, and a language teacher guides oral and written work. Principals plan the year around terms, assessments and board classes, and a teacher missing in February is a bigger problem than one missing in July. Staff include subject teachers, coordinators, lab assistants, librarians and office staff. The wider education hub covers what all schools and colleges share.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
Some teachers carry stacks of written work and project files every week while others in the same school carry far less, and nobody has counted it.
A good Class 10 teacher is hard to replace mid-year, so an exit in the autumn term leaves students and the principal exposed.
When a teacher is absent the coordinator finds cover in the morning, and the free periods of the same few teachers get used again and again.
A teacher with ten good years in the same room, same books and same pay scale starts looking at other schools or at tuition income.
A single observed lesson and a form tell a teacher little, and the strong and weak teachers receive near-identical feedback.
Teachers attend workshops, but the school holds no record of who learnt what, so later planning starts from nothing.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Performance Management; Learning and Development; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for education, not in general.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a ICSE schools business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A simple sheet of periods, marking volume, practical batches and duties for each teacher, so that fairness can be discussed with numbers rather than complaints.
What this coversHideA simple sheet of periods, marking volume, practical batches and duties for each teacher, so that fairness can be discussed with numbers rather than complaints.
Retired teachers, trained homemakers and part-time graduates, with their subjects noted.
What this coversHideRetired teachers, trained homemakers and part-time graduates, with their subjects noted. Shift and leave planning can keep the cover roster steady.
Name the teachers for the next Class 9 and 10 batches, a back-up for each, and the handover notes they will leave behind.
What this coversHideName the teachers for the next Class 9 and 10 batches, a back-up for each, and the handover notes they will leave behind.
One page shared with teachers before the year begins, with two or three visits across the year.
What this coversHideOne page shared with teachers before the year begins, with two or three visits across the year. See performance management.
Workshops attended, subjects trained in, and next learning goal, kept where the head can see it.
What this coversHideWorkshops attended, subjects trained in, and next learning goal, kept where the head can see it. The learning and development process uses it.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A hiring route for subject and board-class teachers that tests teaching, not just certificates.
Appraisal that uses more than one observed lesson and gives usable feedback.
Staff development records and a plan that follows each teacher.
Leave rules and substitute cover that spread the load fairly.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in education, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Faculty, administrative and support staff leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it within the academic calendar.
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Measures that show how reactor, console, lab and gantry staff are really doing, the ones that mislead or bury near misses, and a monthly sheet an in-charge can run in twenty minutes.
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Plastics training dies when it waits for a free Saturday. Tie it to mould changes, purges and cold starts, use one-point lessons and a visible skill ladder, and protect it in peak months.
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How to spot an unmanageable workload before it becomes an exit or an error, what to look at, how to talk about it and what to change, without guessing.
5 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Use local colleges, retired teachers and former staff, and ask the board-class teachers for names. A short demonstration lesson helps more than a long interview.
Only if the load is counted and the teacher agrees. Spread written work across the department where you can, and give relief periods in the weeks before exams.
Offer a clear step such as subject coordinator or board-class lead, with a written role. If there is no post, a project like curriculum planning can recognise the person.
Share the criteria first, observe more than once, speak to the teacher after each visit and keep notes. The aim is better teaching, not a score for its own sake.
Yes. Keep a list of available teachers by subject, share a weekly cover roster, and track who has covered how often. It stops the same few being drawn on every week.
First we would count marking and period load, list the board-class teachers whose exit would hurt most and look at how cover and appraisal run today. A teacher workload sheet and a cover roster are usual first jobs.
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