Five things a new teacher inherits,
in this order.
Onboarding in a small school is usually a tour, a login and a timetable, and it produces a teacher who is on their own by Tuesday. What a new teacher actually needs is the school's way of working, transferred to them before they have to invent one: what they teach, the materials to teach it with, how they assess, which rules they apply, and what families are used to seeing. The order matters, because each depends on the last.
The test of onboarding is not whether the teacher feels welcome, though they should. It is whether, in week three, their class looks like the school's other classes to a parent: the same kind of homework, the same quizzes, the same report at the same time, the same voice in the portal. A school in which every class is a different school is one the families will compare from the inside.
A school is what it has written down.
The rest leaves with the teacher.
The transfer in the first week is only possible if the school's way of working exists outside the heads of its current staff. Four assets do the work: a written curriculum by level and course, saying what is taught in which week and assessed when; the materials that go with it, so that a lesson is edited rather than authored; an assessment format — what a quiz looks like, when it happens, how it is recorded — and the report template that turns it into something a parent reads; and the policies, on one page each, for attendance, safeguarding, cancellation and what goes in the portal. A school with these four can onboard a teacher in a week and survive a resignation. A school without them onboards by apprenticeship and loses the course when the teacher goes.
Build them in that order and do not wait for them to be perfect. A curriculum written down at the level of "week 4: past simple, regular and irregular; quiz Friday" is a school asset; a curriculum in a teacher's memory is not. On SprintUp, courses, activities and quizzes live in the campus by course and are visible to every teacher assigned to the class, and the AI curriculum tools generate a first draft of the outline and the materials without a meter, so the writing-down is editing rather than authorship; the decision to have a school curriculum rather than seven private ones is still the school's.
Watch the preparations,
not only the hours.
Load is counted in contact hours because they are what the school pays for. It is carried in preparations — distinct classes to plan, resource and mark — and the two numbers can diverge badly. Twenty hours across three levels means three lesson plans a week, taught several times each and improving with each repetition, and three sets of marking that can be batched. Twenty hours across seven levels means seven plans written from scratch, taught once each, and seven sets of marking that cannot. The first teacher is getting better at three things; the second is surviving. When classes are allocated, watch the second number, and accept a less tidy timetable to keep every teacher under four preparations where the school's size allows.
Where it does not — a small school with one teacher per language, say — reduce the cost of a preparation rather than the count. Shared materials by level, a written curriculum, generated first drafts, and quizzes that come ready to use turn seven preparations from seven authorships into seven edits. That is the practical meaning of the second article in this cluster.
Somebody gets the evening exam group.
Say how you decide.
Some hours are worth more than others: the evening classes that pay a higher rate, the exam groups that are satisfying to teach and visible when results come out, the daytime one-to-one with a motivated adult. Some are worth less: the Saturday-morning kids' class, the split day, the A1 group in the room without a window. A school allocates these every term, and if it does not say how, it is allocating them by habit and by who was there first, which produces a hierarchy everyone can see and nobody can question.
Any of the first three is defensible; most schools combine qualification for the exam groups with rotation or seniority for the rest. The only indefensible option is the fourth. State the rule at the start of the year, apply it in the allocation, and accept that some teachers will dislike it: a rule they dislike and can see is better for retention than a habit they suspect and cannot.
Fewer than you think,
more than most schools keep.
A small school needs, for each teacher: the qualifications and the levels they are cleared to teach; the availability grid for the term and the maximum load agreed; the classes allocated and the preparation count; the observations made and when; the policies they have signed; and, where the school teaches children, the safeguarding checks the jurisdiction requires and their dates. That is the whole list, and most schools keep half of it in a drawer and the other half nowhere.
Two things about the record are not a matter of choice. The employment status of teachers — employee or contractor — is a legal question that varies by country and has consequences for pay, tax and what the school can require, and it should be settled with advice before the second teacher is hired, not discovered at an audit. And the record is personal data about your staff, held under the same data-protection obligations as the data you hold about students; keep it where access is controlled and where it can be exported or erased when a teacher leaves and asks. On SprintUp, teacher accounts and their class allocations sit in the campus, which covers the operational part of the record; the personnel file is the school's, and the platform is not an HR system.