Teachers Together achieves REC Audited Education status

Teachers Together has recently been awarded REC Audited Education status by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation - the professional body for the UK's recruitment industry.

I want to explain what that means, and why it matters to the schools we work with.

What REC Audited Education is

REC Audited Education is the sector's recognised standard for compliance and best practice in education recruitment. It was introduced in 2013 to build on the legacy of the Department for Education's own Supply Teacher Agency Quality Mark, which the REC had managed on the government's behalf for over a decade.

REC Audited status isn't a membership badge or a self-declaration - it involves a two-stage external process: an online diagnostic assessment followed by a tailored on-site audit. The audit covers documentation and policies, candidate files and vetting records, employment practices, and, importantly, how staff actually apply those processes in practice through direct interviews with the team. You can read more about what the audit involves on the REC website.

What it means for schools

When you work with a supply agency, you're trusting that the people they place have been properly vetted, that safeguarding checks are in order, and that the agency operates in line with its legal obligations. Most of the time, you're taking that on faith.

REC Audited Education replaces faith with verification. An external body has reviewed how we operate - our safeguarding processes, our compliance with Keeping Children Safe in Education, our DBS and right to work checks, our employment practices, our complaints procedures - and confirmed that they meet the standards required.

For headteachers and school business managers, that means one less thing to take on trust. It's the kind of assurance that matters particularly during Ofsted inspections, when schools need to demonstrate that agency staff have been appropriately vetted, and increasingly when working with multi-academy trusts whose procurement requirements are becoming more rigorous.

What it means for our members

The audit doesn't only assess how we work with schools. It also covers how we work with the educators we place - our employment practices, the fairness and transparency of our processes, and the support we provide. It’s an independent confirmation that the way Teachers Together operates holds up to external scrutiny.

Since starting the company in 2020, we have built Teachers Together around the principle that education recruitment should be transparent, compliant, and fair. Achieving REC Audited status is confirmation to our partners and members that we are operating as we should be and are committed to keeping it that way.