From time to time you may notice the term 'Flexi Booking' appear on your booking request invite. This is a new feature that has been added to a school's booking flow for when they don't have information on what class or teacher you are meant to be covering.

Flexi Booking simply gives you a heads up that this is the case, and not a case of the school just leaving it out for no reason.

Schools are encouraged to update the booking when they have that information at hand - and before the booking date.

ClassCover has seen an increase of schools creating booking requests without including the class / year group / teacher that needs covering. While there is often a good reason for this—you can't include information that you don't have—it can lead to anxiety among teachers and have a negative impact on booking acceptance rates.

We asked schools why they were leaving this out and found some interesting insights.

We found that out of the group of schools that leave this out often, 60% aren't including details as they book in advance and aren't yet sure of what they will require the teacher to teach.

20% are pretty certain there will be last minute changes and don't want a teacher spending time preparing for a class they may not have.

We then surveyed teachers to get insights on how bookings with no information are received

When receiving a booking request with no info:

Overall, not taking into account how they respond to a booking request with no info, 57% of survey respondents said they would be more likely to respond to a request if the school stated that it was a Flexi-Booking.

For those who said they currently don’t respond at all, the addition of Flexi Booking would boost response rates by 48% for this group.

For those who decline a booking with no info, the addition of Flexi Booking would boost job acceptance by 35% for this group.