NISTR Schools Newsletter

Welcome to the Latest NISTR Newsletter

Welcome to the latest update from NISTR. This newsletter will provide you with information on new system upgrades and plans for future development as well as outlining key processes for schools and services using the system.

We are pleased to report that we now have 8,663 live Supply Teachers within the NISTR solution, and over 182,349 bookings have been made in the system since the NISTR launch. In February, 21,958 bookings for 59,764.2 days were verified for payment by 1,120 schools in relation to 5,522 teachers.

Further System Upgrades

Additional system upgrades were successfully made to NISTR on Thursday, 16th March 2023. We are extremely grateful to those who took time to provide feedback on their experience of NISTR to inform this system development. Some key changes that will impact schools and EA services are:

Recording supply teacher absence has been redesigned. Attendance status is now linked to each individual day rather than the whole booking. Whilst your ‘active’ bookings (those that still require you to sign-off days within them) will have the overall attendance status automatically populated to each individual day, bookings that have been fully exported to payroll will not change at this time. These completed bookings will be auto-populated with an updated attendance status in the coming weeks. To allow for this update, there will be a period of about 3-4 weeks where you may not be able to see the attendance status of an old booking. If you require this information, in exceptional circumstances (e.g. Safeguarding, or a possible financial/compliance detriment), please contact NISTR Administration and they will support you in getting the information you need. A new training video on the Attendance Status changes is available here.

Additional performance enhancements will also be made, which will improve overall user experience of the system.

Extended Development Schedule

As previously communicated, to bring the NISTR solution to users in time for the start of the academic year, we selected vital functionality that enabled the booking of a supply teacher. We have continued to work in collaboration with the solution developers and key stakeholder groups including Supply Teachers, Schools, Employing Authorities and Trade Unions, to bring School User/ EA Service Users and Supply Teachers more features, in addition to addressing any areas of functionality that are not working as expected. Thank you to those that have contacted NISTR to provide feedback on the system to date, as this has significantly informed our approach to future technical releases.

NISTR system development was due to complete by the end of March 2023. We have now extended this development schedule to ensure that we provide a fully streamlined service for supply teacher booking for all users. Two additional system updates will be released from April – May 2023 to offer further enhanced functionality and improved user experience.

Use of NISTR

This new updated NISTR solution was introduced to support schools and teachers to adhere to the guidance outlined in DE circular TNC 2016/1, “In all circumstances substitute teachers must be sourced and appointed through the Northern Ireland Substitute Register (NISTR)” and to address any feedback provided by schools and teachers using the service. It is essential that all supply teacher bookings are now made through NISTR and that any practice of sourcing teachers using alternate means is ceased. A community effort is now needed to ensure that NISTR works successfully for everyone:

Supply teachers are prompted to update their profiles when required on a weekly basis. It is vital that these prompts are actioned to enable teachers to appear in school search results and to be booked by a school.
If all supply teacher bookings are made via NISTR and all other exceptional bookings are recorded in a timely manner, the integrity of the system information will be maintained and the status of all live teachers will be accurate. This best practice ensures that school leaders and cover managers do not lose valuable time contacting teachers who are already engaged.

Not only will the universal use of NISTR remove much frustration around the booking process, it will most importantly ensure the safety of our children in schools. Only supply teachers who are live on NISTR are vetted and cleared to work with children.

Reason for Cover Codes

Reason for Cover Codes are used in NISTR to financially manage and report on supply teacher costs across a range of Authority, School and Stakeholder budgets, earmarked funds, and projects. The current Reason for Cover Codes have been in use for a number of years. Recently, the EA has undertaken a review of these codes, and in line with feedback from schools, has revised and rationalised these codes to improve efficiency and clarity, and to best align with required financial reporting structures.

NISTR will now align with EA’s changes, upgrading the system to deactivate the current codes and make active a new list of Reason for Cover Codes. All ongoing existing NISTR bookings will automatically migrate to map the original code to the appropriate replacement code to minimise any impact on NISTR end users. This change is planned to take place mid-April.

In advance of this change being introduced, each school will be provided with a full list of Reason for Cover Codes appropriate to school sector, and the map from old to new. There will also be a useful search facility to allow schools to look up an original code and identify the new code to be used. We hope these resources will minimise the adjustment for schools in this transition.

If you have any queries around this process, please do not hesitate to contact NISTR Helpdesk.

Top Tips

Decline a booking

Supply Teachers can now decline an ‘offered’ booking and provide a reason for declining to a school. Schools may then recreate the booking within the NISTR solution to offer the position to another suitable teacher.

Teacher availability

User feedback from schools suggests ongoing issues with finding teachers available on NISTR. We appreciate this can be frustrating for all involved, and we recognise the need for a community effort to ensure NISTR works successfully. Please see our previous section on ‘Use of NISTR’ to read more about the recommendations we are making to support schools and teachers to maintain the accuracy of teacher statuses on NISTR.

Teachers who meet school search criteria by 75% or more will show in search results. Please look at the suitability of each teacher and select the best fit for your requirements.

Teachers with offered bookings will show as 'available' in searches, a teacher will not show when they have confirmed a booking.

Reasons why a teacher may not be found:

The Supply Teacher may not be registered
The Supply Teacher may be in the process of registration and may not be ‘LIVE’ yet (i.e., they are awaiting their GTCNI, AccessNI or Health checks).
They are unavailable as they have been booked by another school
The teacher may not have their subject and key stages list updated to match the criteria of your required booking
The Supply Teachers availability is not updated to reflect ‘available’ at the time of the booking and therefore not included in the search results
The booking does not fall within the Supply Teacher school parameters (e.g., distance willing to travel, School type etc) and therefore not included in the search results.

If you need to book a specific teacher (e.g., when setting up a fixed term contract booking) the Supply Teacher must ensure that their parameters/ preferences and availability are in line with the school booking details to be included in the search results. Once these have been updated, the school can refresh their search results list.

Filtering and sorting bookings

To help manage bookings more efficiently you can sort and filter from the bookings overview screen by selecting the rotating booking tile on the Dashboard. Along the top of the screen, you have the option to filter by Booking ID, From/To Date and the status of the booking.

bookings icon

If you want to view Confirmed bookings only, click Select Status and update to Confirmed from the drop-down. The page will update automatically based on your selection. You can reorder by clicking the arrows to the right-hand side of the column.

We are currently working on further developments to the booking process, which will enable schools to easily create a booking pattern, for example a booking which requires Monday am only and Thursday all day between specific date range. It will remove the manual inputting or withdrawal of days in between the date range. This development is due for release in April with the next NISTR upgrade.

Teacher Absence

Recording supply teacher absence has been redesigned in the latest functionality update in March. The attendance status is now linked to each individual day rather than the whole booking. A new training video on the Attendance Status changes is available here.

Whilst your ‘active’ bookings (those that still require you to sign-off days within them) will have the overall attendance status automatically populated to each individual day, bookings that have been fully exported to payroll will not change at this time.

Signed off bookings can be edited until the booking is exported to payroll, for example attendance status can be edited right up to the point where the booking is exported to payroll. No changes can be made after export to payroll.

These completed bookings will be auto-populated with an updated attendance status in the coming weeks. To allow for this update, there will be a period of about 3-4 weeks where you may not be able to see the attendance status of an old booking.

However, if you require this information in exceptional circumstances (e.g. Safeguarding, or a possible financial/compliance detriment), please contact NISTR Administration and they will support you in getting the information you need.

Short Notice Supply (SNS)

Short Notice Supply advertisements are designed for vacancies requiring to be filled on the day of the booking or the next working day. It is offered to supply teachers based on Key Stage(s) and Core Subject matching the requirements for the post and the supply teacher including the school in in their My School list. Teachers must have more than 75% availability for the duration of the booking to apply for the vacancy.

Notifications for vacancies are received in real-time. The browser may need refreshed to view updated offers on the Short Notice Supply. To refresh on mobile devices, please pull down on screen and release.

Supply teachers are encouraged to apply immediately for any vacancies of interest. Once the position is filled, the short notice supply position will no longer appear on the dashboard. Schools also have the option to cancel SNS vacancies or it will expire, impacting on the notice visibility.