Education Today Education Today Magazine
Comment by NICK ORDE-POWLETT, Managing Director at TIB Services
Every day without a caretaker is a day your school feels the strain. Classrooms take longer to open, maintenance jobs pile up, and your staff stretch themselves thin to fill the gaps. Site management is one of those areas where absence is immediately visible. From the moment the gates open, the difference is felt by pupils, staff, and the wider school community..
Yet despite how critical the role is, many schools underestimate the time cost of recruiting a caretaker in-house.
When a caretaker leaves, the instinct is often to handle recruitment internally. After all, who knows your school’s needs better than you? But in practice, this approach can consume more senior leadership time than expected.
Consider the full picture. Writing and approving job adverts. Managing listings and responding to queries. Sifting through CVs, scheduling interviews, and coordinating with HR. Then come compliance checks, including online background checks, references and waiting for DBS clearances to come through to meet KCSIE safeguarding requirements. Once the offer is made, notice periods can stretch for weeks, and induction or sitespecific training may add more time before the new recruit is fully effective.
Taken together, schools can spend up to 30 hours of senior leadership time on a single recruitment cycle. That’s time that could otherwise be spent on curriculum planning, staff development, or pupil outcomes—areas where leadership impact is most valuable. The vacancy itself also has knock-on effects. Without a caretaker, tasks are redistributed across leadership and support staff, diverting attention from core duties. Site standards can slip and maintenance backlogs grow.
From start to finish, the in-house process can stretch beyond two months, a significant period of operational disruption in a busy school calendar.
This isn’t to say schools should never recruit directly. For some, it’s the right choice,particularly if there’s internal talent ready to step up. But it’s important to make these decisions with full awareness of the hidden costs, both in leadership time and the wider impact on school operations.
Whether schools choose to manage recruitment internally or explore external support, planning ahead is key. That means maintaining a clear, up-to-date job description, understanding the full compliance requirements, and having a plan of action prepared for unexpected absences.
Ultimately, the question isn’t just how to find the right caretaker, it’s how to do so without diverting precious leadership capacity from the core mission of education. Every hour saved on administration is an hour that can be invested in pupils, staff, and the school’s strategic goals. In today’s challenging landscape, that’s not just an operational choice, it’s a leadership one.
