Hi Philippa, I’m also facing this decision at the moment and have been interested to read previous threads on the subject.
At the moment we are a two school MAT with c250 staff. There are two part-timers in HR carrying out all HR activities centrally. We will shortly be growing to 4 schools and doubling our employee numbers. I’m considering having an HR Assistant at each school carrying out the most transactional work (arranging interviews, pre employment checks, new starter set up). The HR Assistants would report to a local School Business Manager with a dotted line to Central HR. Centrally the HR team would be responsible for HR Strategy, resourcing, ER, remuneration etc as well as contracts and contractual changes being processed by a central HR Administrator. At the moment that would be the HR Manager and HR Admin, the next role I would add would be a Recruitment Manager as this is a particular area of need.
I’m really interested in what others think about the merits of the school based HR Assistant role and it not reporting into the Central HR team.

Marianne

We have one central team for a growing Trust of 15 academies (mix of primary & secondary). This team is made up of Head of HR, HR Manager, 3 x HR Officers and 3 x HR Assistants. We then in each school have an HR liaison staff member. In the most part this is the Office Manager. The liaison staff member is the person who would send over the authorised instructions for appointments, variations, leavers and absence etc. They are also available then for new starters to take in any documents directly to the schools, as it is not always the best option for them to drive all the way to our central office. It seems to work well, and from an HR employee perspective, it is really nice to be able to collaborate with a team of like minded people rather than being in a stand alone role based in a school.

In reply to Fiona:

Hi Fiona
Can I ask how many employees you have across the 15 academies? Also are your SCRs maintained centrally or by the HR liaison?
Thanks, Marianne

In reply to Marianne:

We have approximately 1550 staff. The Trust works via cloud based drive so the SCRs are shared documents between the appropriate people at the school and HR. HR update the staffing tab, and the HR liaison is responsible for all the rest. The live shared documents mean that when the records are inspected they can be viewed from either the school or the central HR office and it is always the most up to date information.

In reply to Fiona:

Thanks Fiona that’s really helpful.