The UK’s leading education workforce provider has said flexible staffing is becoming increasingly important  to schools as rising employment costs put already stretched budgets under further pressure.

Affinity Workforce Solutions issued the warning as new figures suggest a quarter of schools cannot afford this year’s teacher pay award, with the NASUWT warning that financial pressures are contributing to cuts in support staff and increasing teacher workloads.

Teachers were awarded a 3.5% pay rise this year, but schools have been required to fund the first 1% from existing budgets.

Affinity says the pressures are reflected in what it is seeing across its own education workforce.

Its latest Candidate Satisfaction Survey, which gathered responses from more than 400 education professionals, found that 23% said they would leave the education sector entirely if supply work was not available to them – highlighting the important role flexible working can play in keeping experienced people within education.

Esme Bianchi-Barry, chief executive of Affinity Workforce Solutions, said: “The numbers from the NASUWT don’t surprise us. They reflect the very difficult reality facing schools and education professionals right now.

“Schools are being asked to absorb additional costs when many simply don’t have room within their budgets, and too often it is the support around the classroom that comes under pressure.

“We recognise that affordability is a real issue for schools right now, which is part of why we work through the Lot 2 element of the GCA framework – a model built specifically to give schools access to a fully managed staffing service in a more cost-effective way than sourcing supply staff individually.

“What our own data also shows is how important flexible working has become to retaining people within education. Almost a quarter of the professionals we surveyed told us they would leave the sector altogether if supply work wasn’t available to them.

“Supply staff shouldn’t be viewed simply as a stopgap. They are increasingly an important part of a sustainable education workforce, giving schools flexibility while providing teachers and support staff with a way to remain in a profession they might otherwise leave.

“At a time when recruitment and retention remain such significant challenges, we cannot afford to lose experienced people from education,” she added.

All school funding models appear to be affected. The NASUWT estimates that 50% of maintained schools and 18% of academies cannot afford the 1% of this year’s pay award they have been told to fund from existing budgets. Two-thirds of teachers surveyed also reported cuts to in-class support from teaching assistants.

Affinity Workforce Solutions works with schools, multi-academy trusts, colleges and training providers across the UK, providing recruitment, compliance and workforce solutions through its brands including Career Teachers, CER Education, Monarch Education, The Protocol Group and Affinity Partnerships.

Affinity holds a Lot 2 position on the Government Commercial Agreement framework (RM6376) as a full end-to-end managed service provider and is one of only four suppliers to have held this position since the framework launched.