July 1, 2010 5.04 pm This story is over 164 months old

City schools spent £400k on supply teachers

£200 per pupil: Schools in Lincoln have spent over £400k on supply teachers alone in the last 12 months.

Schools in Lincoln spent over £445,000 on supply teachers in the last 12 months. The figures come from the Lincolnshire County Council, released under a Freedom of Information request from Amanda Walker on the What Do They Know website.

Supply teachers take over a school class whenever a teacher is unavailable because of illness or personal leave, and are generally paid a flat fee of around £175 per day of work. Supply teachers are usually contracted through an approved agency, and retain around £130 of the fee.

Using these figures, it would equate that Lincoln primary and secondary schools totalled 2,544 days of using supply teachers during the past year. The expenditure represents 23 city schools, though not all schools in the Lincoln area are included in the City Council’s accounting system.

The school with the highest spend on supply teachers is the Lincoln St Peter at Gowts CE Primary School, which spent £49,358 on supply teachers in the last 12 months. The school has 247 pupils, which would equate to just under £200 per child spent on supply teaching only.

Lincoln Christ’s Hospital School took the number two spot in supply teachers expenditure with £47,265; number three was the Caistor Yarborough School with £44,298; number four the Lincoln Monks Abbey Primary School with £36,015 and number five was Lincoln Mount Street Infant & Nursery School with £28,865.

The top five Lincoln schools for supply teaching expenditure declined to comment.

Lincoln St Peters in Eastgate CE School and the Lincoln Bracebridge Infant School spent the least on supply teachers, according to the figures, with £444 and £432 spent in the last 12 months respectively.

County spends £3.5 million on supply teachers

Schools in Lincolnshire (including Lincoln) have spent £3,530,307 on supply teachers over the last 12 months, according to the County Council figures (excluding some schools not present in the County Council’s accounting system).

The top spenders on supply teachers in the county are the Spalding Gleed Boys’ School with £180,441 (£285 per pupil, 647 pupils), the Boston High School with £165,319, the Tattershall Gartree Community School with £154,295, and the Kirton Middlecott School with £121,789.

Download Lincoln data set: 25Kb PDF | Photo: Dean Kerrigan via Flickr