Sitting on Sydney’s North Shore, Lindfield East Public School is home to 590 students with an active P&C that are well integrated in the school community. While this level of involvement from parents and the surrounding community is great in many ways, it also means that the school leadership team can face a higher level of scrutiny when making decisions that impact students.
We spoke to Lindfield East Principal, Diane Read, to hear how ClassCover has helped Lindfield East improve the way they find and book casual teachers to keep everyone in the school community happy.
“We have a very informed school community here, so with ClassCover, we’re able to make sure we get a casual to suit a particular class.”
What was life like for you before ClassCover?
Prior to my time at Lindfield East, I was teaching at another school and to book casuals was a very laborious task. We had a list of casuals with their phone numbers and you would have to sift through and see who was available. It wasn’t a very efficient process. When I came to Lindfield East Public School, the DP I was working with had already signed up with ClassCover which was great.
How did you find the adjustment?
The time saving alone made it a win for me.
What can you tell us about the P&C at Lindfield East?
Our school has a reputation for being high achieving and we receive excellent NAPLAN results. Our P&C are very active in our school community and the committee as well as parents in general have very high expectations.
How has ClassCover helped manage this relationship?
In general, parents don’t like it when you’re swapping and changing teachers frequently. We find that if we have too many different casuals on a class our parents will email me and say ‘You’ve had 10 casuals on this class this year or this term’.
So, using ClassCover, we look at the availability of the casuals to ensure that they can cover the entire absence if it’s for a longer period of time. If there’s a casual that I know would be suitable that I want to book for a number of weeks and I see that they are booked for a few days, I usually ask them to contact the school to see if we can do a workaround. It’s fortunate that most other schools are usually pretty flexible with this because they understand it’s better to have the same teacher working for a longer period of time.
Do you have a favourite ClassCover feature?
Things like the app are fantastic. You immediately put it on your phone, and it’s all so accessible. ClassCover also ensures all the teacher documentation that we need is easily accessible on the platform and it can be easily viewed from the app as well. So it’s very easy to use. Having everything accessible on my phone is really the best feature for me.
