St Peter’s Catholic Primary | ClassCover School Stories

Sitting between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast in Southeast Queensland, St Peter’s Primary is one of 150 schools in the Brisbane Catholic Education Diocese that trust ClassCover to find, book, and manage their casual relief teachers. With a buzzing population of over 650 students and 70 teachers, leadership, and support staff, we sat down to speak to one of the team that helps manage it all.  

Since joining St Peter’s in 2012, Kristy Tanner has moved between a number of roles in the school office, getting to know the community along the way and learning what it takes to keep a school of this size running. In her current role as Principal’s Assistant, Kirsty is in charge of managing the school’s cohort of casual relief teachers.  

ClassCover saves time for school staff 

For Kristy, a typical workday can start as early as 5am when messages from sick teachers start rolling in. Considering the number of students and teachers at the school, barely a day goes by that Kristy doesn’t use ClassCover to organise a casual teacher. Thanks to the accessibility of our app, she usually does this from her phone while she eats breakfast and gets ready for the day ahead.

Talking about the way Kristy uses ClassCover, it’s the versatility of the app that makes it such a great fit for St Peter’s. With such a big school community, there are days when it’s important to have access to a large pool of casual teachers. On a recent planning day, for example, Kristy needed to find and book fourteen casual teachers on the one day.  

“Days do happen where we need to book a large number of relief teachers at once. That’s where ClassCover really helps with tools like the broadcast feature that allows us to send out a bulk message to several or all of the teachers on our list to make sure that we can get those classes covered.” 

Find teachers that are the right fit 

When asked about the school culture at St Peter’s, Kristy compared it to a big family, with some staff working at the school for over 30 years.  

“One of our admin staff I believe started here in 1974. Some of our teachers are even teaching the children and grandchildren of their former students. I think that speaks to what a good place this is to be if people are here that long.”  

With a legacy like that to uphold, ClassCover has been a valuable tool to not only help the school find casual teachers, but also ensure they are finding teachers that are the right fit for the school community, using features like the ClassCover jobs board.  

“I recently posted an ad for the first time on the ClassCover jobs board and found that was a really good way to find new teachers. The extra vetting that this allows us to do means we can be sure we’re finding teachers that are a good fit for the school. 

In fact, finding short-term teachers on ClassCover has proven to be an effective pipeline for more long-term teachers, helping insulate St Peter’s from the current teacher shortage impacting the country. Kristy explains.  

“We’ve had teachers we found on ClassCover go on to be offered longer contracts and even apply for full-time teaching positions at the school. It really helps us develop relationships and ‘try before we buy’ to get a feel for how suitable they are before we offer them something longer term.” 

Benefits for both the school and teachers  

Asked what advice she would give to other schools thinking of trying ClassCover, Kristy spoke of the benefits the platform brings to both schools and teachers.  

“Absolutely try it! It’s a great way to save time, connect with staff, and find new relief teachers. It’s also a better system for the teachers because rather than having to rely on their calendars and write each new job down themselves, ClassCover keeps track of all their bookings so they can easily check them right from their phone. I haven’t had anyone forget to turn up while using ClassCover.” 

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