What the half hour contains #
A message comes in. Somebody has to know, immediately, what that person was teaching today, who is free, whether the free person is already covering something else, whether the class needs a specialist, whether a teaching assistant is attached to a child in that room, and whether the school can absorb it internally or has to call an agency.
If it is an agency, that is a booking, a rate, an arrival time and a set of checks. Then the consequences ripple.
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The cover teacher's own class needs covering
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A duty needs reassigning
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A meeting moves
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Reception needs to know who is arriving and what to do with them
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The class teacher needs work set, or somebody needs to set it for them
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Parents may need telling
And all of it is finished, one way or another, by the time the bell goes. It is the most time-critical repeated job in a school and, in most schools, it belongs to one person plus whoever covers for them.
Why it is so hard to hand over #
Because the person who does it holds three things in their head that are not written down anywhere.
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Who is actually free at any given moment
Once meetings, planning time and part time contracts are accounted for.
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Which staff can reasonably be asked
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Which agency picks up at six in the morning
When that person is away, a school that runs cover smoothly for two hundred days runs it badly for one, and everybody notices. That is the classic symptom of a process that lives in a person rather than in a system. It is not a criticism of the person. It is the reason this job is worth looking at properly.
The checks do not relax for one day #
Keeping children safe in education 2026, in force from 1 September 2026, requires schools to obtain written notification from any agency or third party organisation that it has carried out the same checks the school would otherwise perform, including written confirmation that the enhanced DBS certificate has been obtained.
Agency and third-party supply staff must appear on the single central record even if they work for one day, with the date the written confirmation was received.
There is also a commercial layer worth knowing about.
The DfE and Government Commercial Agency deal for schools
The DfE and Government Commercial Agency run a preferred supplier deal for schools in England, published on 31 August 2018 and last updated on 3 September 2026, under which participating agencies publish transparent mark-up rates, provide evidence of DBS clearance, ten year employment history and references from the last two years, and waive temp-to-perm fees where a worker has served over 12 weeks and the school gives four weeks notice.
Which parts run on rules #
More than most schools expect. The Workload Reduction Taskforce put administration of cover for absent teachers at item 17 on its list of tasks that should not require a teacher, and it is right that the clerical half is large.
Runs on rules
- Knowing who is free in a given period, from the timetable, the calendar and the contracts
- Proposing an internal option before an agency is called
- Issuing the booking, notifying everyone affected and updating the day's staffing record
- Creating the single central record entry with the date the agency's written confirmation arrived
- Producing the cost of cover across a term, which most schools can only estimate
Knowing who is free is a calculation rather than a memory.
Stays with a person
- Whether to ask a colleague who covered twice last week
- Whether this class can be split or genuinely needs a specialist
- Whether a child with an education, health and care plan can be supported by someone unfamiliar today
- Whether the honest answer is that the school cannot safely open that room
Professional and pastoral judgements, made under time pressure.
The reason to clear the mechanics out of the way is that those judgements are currently made in the same thirty minutes as the data entry.
If the question behind this is whether to bring cover in house, the true cost of an employee calculator gives you one half of the comparison. The page next to this one is safer recruitment paperwork, which is where the checks behind every agency booking actually live.