Help with staffing and rotas

[pickles37]

Hi everyone,

 

I am looking for some advice on how we can make our staff totals simpler.

 

We run breakfast club, preschool, lunch club, Preschool and after school club with about 73 children on roll. We have 2 admin staff, 7 childcare staff including me as setting manager all working different hours and shifts. We have a Rota and room Rota, but I spend so much time checking ratios against staff, changing lunches because sickness or days off and it takes up so much of my time. I am finding it too mush to sort out.

 

Any solutions or ideas - what do you all do???

[Lyanne]

Probably not much help, as we are a smaller setting with less session options...

 

We offer am session, lunch club & pm session, with children in no more than 8.30 - 3.30, and only have 1 room. We've got 51 children on roll, 2 admin staff and 10 childcare staff with different hours & days worked.

 

Almost all of our children have at least 15 hours, usually over the mornings or afternoons, & the spaces are 'fixed' in that we book them for the term. (We can change if parents request it & we have spaces at the preferred times, but it's mostly an extra lunch club or extended session as a one off.)

 

We use an excel spreadsheet for the registers, using the sort function to put children in age order with the oldest ones first, & put the 2 year olds in red text so it's easy to differentiate as we count them. (The registers are printed monthly, so the children who turned 3 in April counted as 2 year olds for the whole of April, but are in black text as 3 year olds from May.)

 

As we print out each month's registers, I count up how many staff we need for each session based on the children booked in & write it at the top of each page.

 

We can take up to 28 children at a time, but restrict lunch club to no more than 16 children, to give staff the chance to have a lunch break as we don't need so many staff over lunch as throughout the 3 hours sessions. Also, from September 2015, we said we would only take children for lunch club once aged 3 or over. This means we need only 2 staff on lunch club at a time, and as our lunch club numbers have gone down, we're on not more than 5 children in with their packed lunches.

 

We're only open in term time, and no staff member currently works 5 days a week, so the expectation is that appointments etc are booked outside of work time. This doesn't always work, of course, plus staff have sick days or go on courses...

 

But we aim to cover like with like, so if Jenny who works Monday 9.15 to 2.45 is on a course, we get Rachel to do at least those hours and Rachel looks at the deployment sheet and does what Jenny would have done.

 

Sorting the deployments at the beginning of the school year takes a while, looking at who is out with college, uni etc, who leaves early or comes in late, making sure someone isn't crazy busy one day and that the same person isn't down to set up the garden every morning. But it only needs small tweaks over the year as staff change days, leave, etc.

[finleysmaid]

Hi everyone,

 

I am looking for some advice on how we can make our staff totals simpler.

 

We run breakfast club, preschool, lunch club, Preschool and after school club with about 73 children on roll. We have 2 admin staff, 7 childcare staff including me as setting manager all working different hours and shifts. We have a Rota and room Rota, but I spend so much time checking ratios against staff, changing lunches because sickness or days off and it takes up so much of my time. I am finding it too mush to sort out.

 

Any solutions or ideas - what do you all do???

I have begun to realise that my staff must be angels!

 

Could the room managers take over the responsibility for sorting swops out with their teams?

or could you have a system where staff sort out their own swops (when I managed a team of 120 this is what they all did....otherwise I would have gone mad!....the premise was if they were on rota they did their shift otherwise they organised cover. Holidays were plotted on a yearly chart and blocked of on the rota paperwork...

There are computer programs that will do rotas if you get really stuck!

[Thumper]

Our staff have set days and hours. They must swap their session with another staff member of they can't make it for some reason.

It works really well even when they are off at the last min due to sickness.

Only time I have to help sort things out is when no one is available which is infrequent to be honest.