Services for the education sector 

The emotional, social, physical and financial wellbeing of both teaching and support staff has always been important. However, as we are emerging into a ‘new normal’ there is no doubt that the pandemic has irrevocably transformed the way people work, think and act as well as their priorities.

Evidence shows a holistic wellbeing offering, proactively enabling staff to look after their health and wellbeing, leads to increased levels of happiness and productivity.

We use proven and award-winning analytical tools to help truly understand the wellbeing issues faced by education sector staff, to target interventions and improve wellbeing and happiness.

Within the education sector in particular, it is vitally important to have a well-considered benefit strategy covering administration, communications and the range of benefits to be offered.

Helping schools get the right benefits offerings and helping staff understand them will be critical to help with recruitment and retention and ensuring the right work/life balance for staff.

Our consultancy experience combined with our powerful survey and analytics tool can help organisations truly understand the opinions, concerns and needs of their staff to build an informed benefit strategy. From our experience, a staff survey is an important first step in the process of engaging with staff.

The streamline version of our award-winning benefits platform, 4me, has been built specifically for the education sector and independent schools in particular. It helps educate and engage staff and seamlessly facilitate complex choices, removing manual work and reducing the risk of costly errors.

An integrated Total Reward statement, voluntary benefits, pension choices and wellbeing matters can all be addressed on our single, easy-to-use platform.

The platform can be varied across staff populations meaning an organisation can offer 4me to all of its staff as a single common tool to help with consistency across the workforce.

All employers with over 250 employees are required to regularly report their gender pay gap in advance of regulatory deadlines, and it is expected that other forms of pay gap reporting will be mandated in future. These calculations can be complex and time consuming – schools, colleges and universities may have limited resources available to carry out this work.

Education bodies can benefit from our interactive online pay gap analytical dashboard not only to accurately calculate and report regulatory pay gap figures but to allow deeper analysis and segmentation to inform narrative and action-planning. The analytical tools and support can also be used by organisations with less than 250 employees.

Clear, jargon-free and meaningful communications are essential to ensure engagement with teachers and support staff remains high and that staff have a full understanding of the message being presented – for example the options available to them and the value to them and their loved ones.

Every project a school, college or university undertakes will be different and individual staff members will have different needs and levels of understanding. Our communications and engagement service offers a refreshingly straightforward solution.

Substantial changes in pensions legislation over recent years have affected senior education staff. As a result, head teachers and other senior leaders may now face tax charges on their ongoing pension savings.

Our Executive Pensions team have assisted a number of head teachers and senior leaders at both independent and state schools, as well as Vice Chancellors and Professors at various universities. Each individual’s circumstances present different challenges, resulting in different approaches. We can assist on methods of minimising the consequences of any adverse taxation.