PK Education

PK Education are on a mission to improve the reputation of the recruitment industry, through intelligently matching teachers to schools to give both sides the confidence & support they need.

Karl Housley, Director at PK Education provided us with a summary of their recruitment business:

“In a nutshell we’re a supply teaching agency. We put teachers and teaching assistants into primary and secondary schools. We also provide support workers for special needs schools We’ve been in business since 2005 and we’ve now got roughly 35 employees. We also have a six-office network, with locations in Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and Birmingham.

“We provide recruitment services for an average of 200 schools, but it does fluctuate throughout the year. During peak times we can supply up to 500 schools.

“We’ve been Croner clients now for just under a year.”

“Before Croner we used a different company to assist with our HR. We wanted to do things the right way, which is why we outsourced HR in the first place. However, sometimes you’ll get a certain situation, or a problem employee, that requires you to assess your options. In this case, there was a single member of staff who nearly caused the rest of the department to walk out due to their behaviour.

“The HR company we were engaged with at the time was advising us on this situation. Because the problem employee had a protected characteristic, all they did was tell us what we couldn’t do. However, we wanted to take action as other employees were threatening to walk out. This would’ve cost us a substantial amount of money.

“Ultimately, we ended up speaking to solicitors who helped us solve the issue. That’s just one example of why we wanted to switch HR providers.”

After several incidents like the above, Karl decided to switch providers, and began to shop around.

“I called up about four other companies, but your business manager, Beaumont Hadley blew me away with his knowledge. Not only that, he completely understood the needs of our business.”

“One of the things I really like about Croner is that they lay out all the options in front of you and highlight the risk of each option. They tailor their advice to our business needs. Croner have absolutely delivered on what we needed since signing up, their support has been superb.

“During lockdown due to coronavirus, we’ve had to make some redundancies, and Croner have really helped us through that. They’ve also assisted with communications—it’s good to know what we need to tell our staff, and how best to convey that information to them. We get regular mailshots from Croner with the latest government updates, which is very useful.

The support throughout the process, from the beginning of lockdown to the easing of it, has been great, and now we’re looking to re-open our offices in July.

We’ll be doing a phased return to work from then until September, and Croner are helping with our risk assessments and all the other challenges that come with getting back to work. We look forward to working with Croner in the future.”