Are London schools’ results slipping?

Posted on by
Reply

The DfE has today published the provisional data about attainment in the school-year 2025/26 Secondary school performance data in England: 2025 to 2026 (provisional) – GOV.UK The data provides two measures, ‘average attainment score’ and the  ‘Percentage of pupils achieving grades 5 or above in English and maths GCSEs’.  

Now, I never put a lot of store by the second of these measures, because it is heavily dependent on the ability of schools to recruit high-quality staff. I may be biased, because I didn’t meet this measure at sixteen, but did go on the good grades at ‘A’ level two years later, and thence to university and my subsequent career.

The other measure of ‘average attainment score’ isn’t perfect, but it does allow for a wider range of achievement, but the outcomes can still be affected by the ability of schools to be able to recruit teachers. Smaller local authorities, covering more homogenous communities, may also fare better in any rankings where those communities are likely to contain a higher proportion of parents engaged with their children’s schooling.

Once again, London boroughs dominate the top twenty-five authorities by outcomes for ‘average attainment score’, taking 17 of the top 25 places. Five of the other eight places are local authorities in the South East. If the Isles of Scilly – the one South West authority in the top 25 – is discounted as a special case, the other two authorities in the top twenty-five were, one in the North West and one in the East of England. Both of these authorities, along with four of the ten Outer London boroughs in the top 25, have selective schools within the authority area.

Interestingly, none of the Inner London’s seven boroughs in the top 25 have selective schools by designation. However, two authorities, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham are relatively small authorities.

Overall, the worst performing London borough was ranked 74th (Lambeth) with Croydon the lowest ranked Outer London borough at a ranking of 70th.

As discussed elsewhere, London has traditionally been able to fund its schools to provide some of the best pupil-teacher ratios in England.  (PDF) PTRS OVER TIME: A REVIEW OF PUPIL TEACHER RATIOS BETWEEN 1974 AND 2024 AND TWO PERIODS OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT RE-ORGANISATION PTRS OVER TIME: A REVIEW OF PUPIL TEACHER RATIOS

Authorities with selective schools do seem to perform well across the country. As the previous posts on pupil place planning have shown, these schools are often well over capacity, raising questions about differences between the selective and non-selective schools in these authorities.   

At the other end  of the table are many local authorities that are either urban metropolitan districts or relatively small urban unitary authorities. The isle of Wight stands out as an example of small non-urban unitary authority close to the foot of the table.

Knowsley and Blackpool and no strangers to the lower reaches of the table. Blackpool was one of the Conservative’s Opportunity Areas, eligible for additional resources and help, but is still 21.5 points adrift of the best performing London borough without selective schools.  

Finally, Cambridgeshire recorded a score of 48.9 in 38th place, whereas Oxfordshire was 67th with  a score of 46.3. Both are fully non-selective authorities serving rural areas, but dominated by a university settlement at the heart of the county. This difference raises a whole set of interesting questions about our state school system.

Are Primary Headteachers underpaid?

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday, the BBC ran a story about graduates and repayment of their tuition fees. Of the three graduates featured: one had paid nothing of the loan off, and her interest payments were increasing; one had paid something, and one had repaid the lot, using a family loan at a lower rate of interest. Plan 2: Three friends on a decade of student loans – BBC News

What stuck me about these three graduates in their 30,s was how much they were earning. One, in private practice, earned £50K; another as a project manager working outside London earned £72K and the third in financial services earned £85K.

Now, all no doubt have responsibilities, but do they have the same level of responsibilities as a primary headteacher, even of the smallest school?

Since last summer, I have seen 36 headships advertised on a scale starting at below £60,000 and more than 270 in total with a scale starting below £70,000. Now there are pension benefits and employer-driven flexitime holidays that the graduate in private practice might not expect, but there is a freedom that self-employment brings, plus other advantages.

Of course, the bottom of the scale might not be where a headteacher start, but it does provide a guideline. Indeed, with falling rolls, I have seen some re-advertisements at a lower salary than the original advert.

In  post earlier this year, I wondered whether about primary headteacher salaries Are state school headteachers overpaid? | John Howson and I make no excuse for returning to the subject. It’s a tough job running some our smallest schools. Little by way  of support staff; mixed age classes, the same amount of DfE demands, from the annual census to attendance returns, let alone Ofsted looming.

I don’t know whether the NAHT still submit job evaluation data comparing headteachers with comparable salaries elsewhere to the School Teachers Pay Review body, and I hope that they still do, because it seems to me that secondary headteachers manging a leadership team are often rewarded with a six figure salary, primary heads managing themselves, and both teaching and providing leadership aren’t properly recompensed. And what happens when a  grumpy parent uses AI to submit a 22 page complaint, and expects  a response?

Hopefully, if the school is in an academy trust or a diocese, help will be forthcoming, but for maintained schools, it will depend upon how many staff are left supporting education in Children’s Services. Not many, in some authorities, I fear.

As I pointed out in the previous post, a teacher in a large primary school on the upper Pay spine and with a TLR (Teaching & Learning Responsibility point) might earn nearly as much a headteacher in a small school, and with the benefit of the 1265 hours worktime directive that doesn’t apply to those on the Leadership Scale, such as headteachers.

I sincerely hope that the School Teachers Pay Review body will consider the issue of the demands of being a headteacher, and the remuneration it deserves. If it doesn’t, I suspect many primary headteachers would make excellent project managers, and not have to work evening and weekends. And, of course they wouldn’t have to deal with staff, parents and pupils.

A headteacher role is a great job, but it needs rewarding appropriately, and not just a sum based upon pupil numbers alone.

Applications to teach: a review of the data

Posted on by
Reply

When I started this blog, way back in 2013, universities were out of favour with the government as a route to train teachers. Indeed, Mr Gove once famously used the term ‘blob’ Am I a blob? | John Howson Now, he was referring to local government, but he might just as well have been fingering university departments of education, such was his dislike of their approach to preparing teachers. He much preferred schools as the location for those learning to become a teacher.

Some years later, this blog reviewed the balance between applications to different routes into teaching. I expressed my views in a post in .  A thank you to Schools of Education | John Howson

In that post, I reviewed the percentages for applications in May over four years, as derived from the then UCAS monthly data reports. This was before the DfE took over recruitment through their portal

So here are the percentages for applications in May over the four years reported in that post and as derived from the then UCAS monthly data reports.

Primary2015201620172018
HE51454847
SCITT89910
SDFEE24272525
SDSAL17191818
Secondary2015201620172018
HE51475052
SCITT8101112
SDFEE29312928
SDSAL121297

I thought it might be interesting to see what has happened since the years of the covid pandemic. (I don’t have 2018-2020 data easily to hand). The monthly data for applications is no longer split between primary and secondary, one of a few unhelpful changes to the data presentation. But, at least, there is still monthly data available, and that data has provided fertile grounds for this blog over the years.

The first point to note, when comparing the two tables, is the change in categories, with the ‘Fee’ route disappearing and the ‘Lead Provider’ route replacing it. The ‘teaching degree apprenticeship’ has also appeared, and is now in its second year of applications. Will its significance grow over the next few years?

ALL20222023202420252026
HE4841384042
SCITT1418162017
Fee Route28
SALARIED671198
LEAD PROV030282119
PG T APP457812
T DeGRE APP00012

It is also worth noting that these are percentages. As a result, they hide the fact that in the period covered by the earlier table, pupil rolls were on the increase, and thus more teachers needed to be trained. Will falling rolls, fewer teachers need to be trained currently. Whether that has affected the view of teaching as a career, is of no immediate concern in this post, as the  basis is the percentages applying for each route.

Apprenticeship have now secured a strong foothold in the minds of would-be teachers, accounting for 14% or nearly one in seven applications by the end of May 2026. School Centred Courses (SCITTs) have been around for more than 30 years now. In May 2025 they accounted for 25% of applications, but have fallen back in 2026 to 17% this May.

The various salaried routes saw an increase in applications after covid, but, possibly because of the graduate apprenticeship route, their percentage seems to be in decline from the 11% of applications reached in May 2024 to eight per cent in 2026.  

Seemingly, higher education is the main loser; down from 48% in 2022 to 42% in May 2026. This is nine percentage points below its position in May 2015, when higher education accounted for 52% of applications. I suspect that a significant percentage of the decline is down to fewer primary places being on offer in the past few years. As those courses normally ‘fill’ with offers early in the cycle, fewer places will have generated fewer applications. The four-percentage point gain over the past two years, may be down to an increase in ‘rest of the world’ applicants who may know more about universities than the other routes on offer. The DfE no doubt has that data, but it is not shared in the monthly statistics.

Where to place the Provider Led courses? Are they a direct transfer from the former School Direct Fee route, or something different. Either way, either their popularity or their availability to applicants,  has seen their percentage decline quite steeply in recent years.

The data in this post is based upon trends in applications. At some point in the future, I will look at trends in ‘offer’ and actual attendance, as measured by the ITT Census, produced each December by the DfE. The post also uses the month of May data, not the endo f the round .This is because by May some subjects and the primary sector are often not accepting any more applications, so May is a good time to review the application round when the majority of courses have been accepting applications.

For now, the universities are still the leading route into teaching, but will vice chancellors still want to play in this game as they consider their financial futures, especially if targets, and thus income will be reducing because of falling rolls? Smaller groups are often uneconomic, and subsidy is not the name of the game in higher education at present. Interesting times.

Selective schools and falling rolls – Part 2 Do we need a national policy?

Posted on by
Reply

Do we need a national policy on how local areas deal with falling school rolls? If so, who should decide? Local authorities – democratically elected, but with little power over academies and voluntary schools? Regional Directors – covering wide areas, and with no democratic accountability? CEOs advising the Board of Governance of MATs – unelected in both cases? Mayors, where they exist, but what about where they don’t?

My preference is for democracy, so, as regular reads might expect, I vote for local authorities, assisted by a committee from the other groups. However, some of those might not want to take challenging decisions, so they might need some guidelines for the DfE and the Labour government for them to work within.

I have looked at the ‘capacity’ and ‘number on roll’ in three councils with selective schools (Slough, Medway and London Borough of Barnet). In all three of these authorities, capacity exceeds rolls. Generally. However, selective schools exceed capacity more than they have spare places. In non-selective schools the picture is more mixed.

In pupil place planning for the future, whoever takes the decisions, there are some questions to answer, based on the evidence of the data about school rolls from schools in these three authorities.

Have all-thorough schools worked?

Has the extension of faith schools beyond a few Christian denominations and Jewish schools after 1997 worked?

What do parents think of single-sex education these days?

Have new forms of academies and free schools flourished?

What part can parental choice play in a falling rolls scenario?

What is both any economic cost, and any educational cost associated with doing nothing?

A final question. Why does the DfE not have admissions policies for three schools across the authorities; two in one authority?

As these are all urban/suburban areas, transport costs don’t matter very much for most families. I will look at selective schools in rural areas later in another post.

It is interesting that the London borough has a smaller capacity gap than either of the other unitary councils. However, the total in all three authorities conceals a wide range of outcomes. I referred to this issue in my post Are dashboards useful? | John Howson where I made clear that just looking at totals is rarely good enough. Measures of central tendency also need to be considered.

The data in this post has used ‘capacity’ and ‘numbers on roll’. Reviewing authorities will also have primary transfer numbers, and group sizes for predictions of future transfer numbers for the next 5-7 years.

If a Scrutiny Committee of an upper tier authority hasn’t considered pupil place planning in the authority recently, then I would suggest they put it on the agenda for a spring meeting, and ask for a detailed paper, even if it means going into confidential session. Not to do so, won’t make the issue go away.

Finally, why did I choose these three authorities? They are in London and South East, where there are a significant number of selective schools, and, the authorities were of a size where I could handle the data. Selective schools and falling rolls | John Howson

 I might next look at three more diverse areas (The South West, West Midlands and East of England regions spring to mind).  

Selective schools and falling rolls

Posted on by
1

Way back in history, well 2018 to be precise, I wrote a blog about selective schools during a period of rising pupil numbers. A fudge with no teeth | John Howson As the country now heads into a period of falling pupil rolls, discussed in my previous post in relation to all secondary schools, I thought that I would take a look at rolls across the selective school sector in the autumn of 2026.

The DfE uses two measures ‘capacity’ and ‘number on roll’. Capacity is defined as ‘The number of pupil places the establishment can accommodate.’ Outwood Academy Hasland Hall – GOV.UK link used as an example. In a rational system might the number on roll (NOR) be expected to be somewhere between +/- say 5% of the capacity number? In reality, in the selective school sector, currently this is not the case.

Selective schools fall into one of three groups;

within the 5% of NOR                                    69
NOR more than 5% below capacity20
NOR more than 5% above capacity74

Just over a half of selective schools are either within or below capacity, whereas 46% of these schools are more than five per cent over the DfE’s recorded capacity.

Are there any regional differences? Answering that question must acknowledge that the spread of selective schools is not even across England, with for fewer in the north and the midlands than in the south and west of England.

Regionwithin the 5% of NOR               NOR more than 5% below capacityNOR more than 5% above capacityTotal% above 5%
East of England404850%
East Midlands7631619%
London61121963%
North East00000
North West12431916%
South East244295751%
South West55102050%
West Midlands80111958%
Yorks & Humber312633%
Total67217416246%

The East Midlands has relatively few selective schools, mostly in rural areas, and most are either within or below capacity. Might this be down to transport issues, and any absence of free transport to  selective schools from rural areas? Both the North West and Yorkshire and the Humber’s regions few selective schools are mostly within or below capacity. Again, might transport be an issue?

In  London, the South East, South West, East of England and the West Midlands, at least half the selective schools are more than 50% over capacity, by DfE data.

London, has the highest percentage of selective school more than 50% over capacity at  63%, followed by the West Midlands at 58%. Both regions have few, if any, schools with selective school operating at more than 5% below capacity. Whether the urban nature of these regions males a difference isn’t clear, but the North West also has few schools operating below capacity.

The next piece of research is to consider the urban/rural nature of selective schools below capacity and whether the lack of free transport might be affecting these schools?

However, the big question is who will lose cash as pupil rolls fall? Will over-capacity selective schools reduce their rolls, and either stop hiring or make staff redundant or will non-selective schools have to bear all the loss of income resulting from falling rolls under the present pupil led funding system?

This is where the importance of pupil place planning becomes clear. What will a Labour government do? Favour selective schools or ensure they return to capacity?

This is an interesting question that needs airing, especially as this Labour government seem as unwilling as the last to design a secondary school system fit or all pupils.  

Falling Rolls: a matter of urgency, but whose?

Posted on by
Reply

In 1977, Haringey council’s Chief Education Officer produced a plan to deal with falling school rolls: it was to cost him his job. His mistake was to be too far ahead of public opinion, for in 1980, school closures, and a reorganisation as a result of fewer pupil numbers became inevitable in Haringey. Among the changes was the closure of the secondary school in Tottenham where I had worked from 1971 to 1977.

This example from history is important for two reasons: firstly, we are living through another period of declining pupil numbers, and secondly, the mechanism for system planning is much weaker today than it was in the 1970s.

In the 1970s, education was often described as a ‘national system locally administered’. Boroughs, such as Haringey, had within the past decade received approval from the government at Westminster to introduce a comprehensive form of secondary schooling. Local planning ratified by government could be seen as normal practice, although not all schools were maintained schools and churches, city livery companies such as the Drapers and the Stationers, as well as other charities had a strong interest in the running of schooling in the borough. However, the ability of the local council to determine how schooling was managed across the borough was not really in question.

How different the world is today, a rump of maintained schools sits alongside the remaining voluntary schools and the block of academies, whether stand-alone of gathered together in Trusts or Committees in local authorities many facing an uncertain future.

Local authorities notionally still have responsibility for pupil place planning, but devolved budgets, powerful Schools Forums and the differing policies of academies and their trust leaders mitigate against local authorities being able to successfully plan the local school system, especially when for the past decade the focus has been on opening new schools.

Overlaying the weak position of local government is another difference from that faced by Haringey’s Chief Education Officer in the 1970s: parental choice: first enshrined in Section 6 of the 1980 Education Act, and now taken for granted.

To view the current  position, I have taken a random sample of secondary schools that have so far this school-year advertised for either a new headteacher or a teacher of music. In both cases, I have looked at DfE data on the notional roll and the actual roll, as shown on the DfE’s public website on 6th October 2026.

The results are interesting.

regioncapacityrolldifference
SE1440759-681
L1150795-355
WM785445-340
NW700364-336
SW1050714-336
L13301092-238
NW12001023-177
SE15601409-151
NE13501201-149
L12601115-145
EM625486-139
YH17501616-134
EE12101084-126
NW750661-89
SW1050990-60
L315272-43
L455436-19
WM11001084-16
EM860847-13
YH710699-11
L10071000-7
NW900894-6
L14501445-5
L121312141
SE4804822
L1164119127
WM60463228
L990102838
WM1253130653
EM1383145471
L12001302102
WM14141524110
L11401271131
SE12191354135
NW9891157168
EM13321809477

There are some very large differences between the ‘capacity’ as shown on the DfE site and the number on roll shown on the same site. There are 13 schools with more than 100 empty places, only three in London.

On the other hand, there are six schools with more than 100 over capacity, two of which are in London.

This was a random sample, so I wondered what might be the implications in selective systems if selective schools were taking more than their ‘capacity’ on other schools and their budgets. I will do a bit of research to find out and report back.

However, it does seem that there is a serious question around effective pupil place planning and the consequences of not doing anything on some children’s learning in the future, if schools are losing income while others are still over-capacity.

Are dashboards useful?

Posted on by
1

LinkedIn invited me to try their new lead generation tool. I asked it to look at this blog, and it came up with a number of possible future posts I could use to gather new readers, all generated by AI (artificial intelligence) from some key prompts and audience identifies that I provided.

It is an interesting piece, although, I have altered (added in italics) some additional text. I would be fascinated to hear what readers think.

AI starts here

A dashboard showing applications up fifteen percent across the board is one of the easier things in education data to misread, and can be one of the more expensive in terms of outcomes.

If you consider recruitment to Initial Teacher Training (ITT) as an example. The structural reason that a dashboard can be misleading is that an ITT recruitment dashboard aggregates things that behave nothing like each other. Domestic and international applicants, candidates with and without visa routes, subjects with entirely different seasonal curves, and applications that will convert at wildly different rates all sit inside the same headline number. The dashboard is honest. The aggregation is what misleads.

Three patterns come up repeatedly:

– Treating a total as a common trend, when a surge in one subject or one applicant group is carrying the whole figure

– Reading application volume as recruitment, when the gap between offer, acceptance and enrolment is where subjects like physics may be very different to that in Classics.

– Comparing the current month to the same month last year without checking whether the policy environment, bursary levels or visa rules changed in between

However, the second-order effect is the one that causes real damage. When a headline figure looks healthy in December, the case for intervention weakens, and by the time the subject-level picture is unambiguous in March the levers that would have mattered, bursary announcements, provider allocations, targeted campaigns, may have already closed for the cycle.

Intervention decisions are can risk being made against an aggregated number at exactly the point in the year when disaggregation would tell you, the reader, something much more useful.

The key takeaway: the dashboard rarely gets the arithmetic wrong. However, all too often it might be read as a single story when, in reality, it is holding four or five different stories, and the one that matters is usually the quietest.

AI ends here.

My message that isn’t in the AI piece, is, if designing a dashboard, first know what is its purpose. If you don’t know what it might reveal, check regularly for trends. As an example: when I first started counting headteacher vacancies in the 1980s, I didn’t know that church schools will be more likely to re-advertise their vacancy than non-faith schools. When looking at teacher vacancies; I didn’t know the rhythm for temporary and maternity leave vacancies being advertised, but I had a hunch, and added the field to the database. As a result, I would also say, collect as much data as you can, when constructing a database, as you might not know what it will tell you.

So, thanks to AI for simulating this post, and quickly offering me some thoughts about many posts I had already written. Does this make this a genuine post or an artificial one?

Why the ITT Census should never be a surprise

Posted on by
Reply

How early in the annual ITT recruitment cycle can you confidentially predict the outcome? I asked myself this question when, earlier today, someone looked up a post on the blog that I wrote in February 2022. Not much of a Christmas Present | John Howson

Based on the data from the end of January 2022 for courses starting that autumn, I wrote the following

‘In summary, there is a degree of caution about the data in this monthly release, but there is almost certainly work still to be done to avoid another year of under-recruitment and a tight labour market for schools in 2023’

This was my cautious way of saying that a further year of trouble lay ahead. Even I, at that time, could not have predicted how far away from the targets the outcome for that year’s recruitment was to be. Of course, the targets may well have been too high, just as the current year’s targets may well be too low in some subjects. Nevertheless, recruitment outcomes were brutal. See STEM subjects ‘late recruiters’? | John Howson and More on the ITT census | John Howson as well as a number of other posts during December 2022 discussing the ITT census and its findings.

Over the course of more than 25 years studying monthly trends in recruitment, I believe that by the end of February in a normal year – Covid pandemic years being an unforeseen exception – it is possible to predict trends from that month’s data. This is because, by then, applications from final year undergraduates and discontented new graduates are in decline as finalists concentrate on exams and final coursework to be replaced for the next six month much more by career switchers.

Crucially, in Jue and July  new graduates that haven’t found a job may swell the number of applicants when there is a tight graduate labour market. If there are plenty of graduate jobs, and the application rate until June has been subdued, a late bounce is unlikely.

In the past three years, application data has been made more challenging to interpret because of the large influx of applicants from ‘the rest of the world’. These applicants may account for as much as 25% of the total number of applicants. Even if they are made ‘offers’ will they obtain the necessary visa to come to England, and then will they be allowed to teacher here? So far, this is an issue in some subjects, but not across the board.

Should the DfE react to poor recruitment data? An interesting question. They did react in 2013 in July when I ventured to suggest some subjects would not hit their targets. You can read what happened in my book ‘teachers, schools and their vies on education’ available either n Amazon or directly from myself via the comments section.

Suffice to say, I think that was a face-saving exercise, but the substantive point remains. Can and should the government intervene in a cycle to help recruitment. Hopefully, with falling rolls and the threat of AI, they won’t need to. However, it is worth remembering that the Training Grant was announced in a March, and had an immediate effect upon recruitment.

Poetry please

Posted on by
Reply

Today is National Poetry Day. As some readers might recall, 2026 is the Year for Reading, so a day celebrating poetry, a form of language that can be both read and spoken ought to be celebrated. Sadly, I fear that isn’t the case today in England.

In the past, when I have celebrated National Poetry Day on this blog, I have offered a poem I have written. One was about war, and sacrifice of young lives; another was about departure, in that case leaving a loved one at an airport.

Sadly, I note the latter of these was in a post more than a decade ago, in 2015. It has been remiss of me not to have highlighted poetry on this blog since then.

For today, I thought that I would offer one from a collection about Oxford, where I have lived for almost 50 years now: since 1979.

The Oxford Canal. (revised July 2024)

Work water now departed:

Leisure flows instead.

Gone barges pulling butties;

As tourist labour locks.

Only residents line banks,

Washing, sitting, growing,

Where dogs stand guard,

Cats enjoy stern sun.

Few walk that path

Horses once trampled.

Clear line unseen ‘neath

Dense overgrown takeover.

See solitude of wooden bridge.

Sentinel in skyline waiting.

Pulling rope restoring purpose:

Vertical to horizontal shift.

While silent lock’s door

Spills excess, seeking release

Granting access now, as narrowboat,

Cruiser, paddle board, gather height.

To silent reach, kingfisher domain,

Voles burrow bank, and vivid

Dragonflies skim blue and green,

Grey heron muting nature’s palate.

Man’s art intrudes, littering

Casually, disfiguring permanently.

Heming sides with barrack blocks.

Building canyons; cutting vistas.

As rural pubs welcomed

Bargee’s evening halt.

Mooring space now tethers

Holiday rentals.

Still canals survive.

Flagging future rails and

Concrete motorway routes.

Slowly amongst the haste

I have chosen this poem partly because I pass the end of the canal almost every time I walk into the city centre, but also because when I was Chair of the county council, during covid, not being able to have the usual fundraising dinner, I walked along the canal from Oxford to Banbury, alone, as a fund raiser for the charities I supported that year. The walk was a distance of around 26 miles, so not far oof the only marathon distance I have ever walked.

I am delighted to say that we have a Poetry Library in Oxford that runs workshops and activities with schools. I know from local book fairs that there are also a number of poetry circles in the city, at least in the west. I celebrate all their activities to help make this word form relevant to modern life.

So, three cheers for National Poetry Day, and please post your favourite poem in the comments.

Finally, for those that know Oxford and the saga of the buses and the Botley Road bridge, this reworking of Alfred Godley and his 1914 poem might strike a chord. For years growing up in London, I wondered what buses were doing ‘in the corn’ on arrival in Oxford it became obvious

Behold the bus

Processing like some affair of State

Not one, but, two, four, six or eight

Lumbering convoys rutting roads with weight

Clean engine, passengers, and double deck create.

Fares please: no cash, but mobile, card or pass

These days. Machines talk, as humans mute remain.

Card accepted; green light flashes, pass along the car.

Seat forward, backward, even sideways, or stand downstairs.

Along the Botley Road they rattle,

Down the High they trundle,

Creep slowly through the Cowley cycles

Rush headlong twenty miles along St Giles.

Deep in phones, passengers miss the engine roar

As fingers fly, while bus patiently pauses, absorbing

New influx of riders, whose hands held out,

Supplicated, is there space for us aboard your omnibus?

Of course, no longer implet in the Corn they are,

But still we see, Copia Motorum Borum.

But no longer is the cry! Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

With apologies to Alfred Godley and his 1914 poem

Teacher shortages are commonplace across the globe

Posted on by
Reply

OECD has today published the 2026 edition of ‘Education Indicators At a glance’. Education at a Glance 2026 | OECD The section on teacher shortages has already received several comments on LinkedIn and elsewhere. I though I might look in some detail about the United Kingdom section in the ’country report’ about teacher shortages.

On the face of it, the UK fares well compared with other countries. Apparently, only 2.9% of teachers in state schools are not fully qualified. I wonder what the percentage would be for Further Education?

Teacher shortages

  • Shortages of skilled workers have affected many sectors across the OECD in recent years, and the teaching profession is no exception. Teacher shortages manifest in different ways across education systems: in some countries, a lack of fully qualified teachers is reflected in a higher share of non-fully qualified staff, while in others a significant number of teaching positions remain unfilled.
  • Non-fully qualified teachers refer to teachers who do not yet meet all the requirements to be recognised as fully qualified teachers under national regulations. In most countries, they either possess the required academic qualifications but lack mandatory certification or teacher training, have completed the required teacher training but do not hold the required academic qualifications, or lack both. In England, 2.9% of all primary and secondary teachers in public institutions were not fully qualified in 2024/25, below the OECD average of 9.1% (Figure 1).
  • Countries use two main approaches to measuring teacher shortages. The first approach estimates shortages before or at the start of the school year based on projected recruitment needs. The second approach measures shortages by counting the number of positions that remain vacant at the start of the school year or shortly after it begins. England uses the second approach, and 0.6% of all teaching positions in public secondary education were unfilled at or shortly before the start of the 2024/25 school year (Table 2). Education at a Glance 2026: United Kingdom

However, it is important to delve into what’ ‘Qualified’ actually means.

In England, possession of QTS allows teachers, not, interestingly, a reserved occupation term, to teach anything to anyone at any level. For the past 25 years, I have been asking for QTS to be linked to phase and subject studied in ITT. However, apart from in the Liberal Democrat Manifesto in 20025, there has been no political appetite to limit QTS in any way. I still think that is a mistake. The over-supply of PE and history teachers has helped keep school fully staffed during the recruitment crisis that started way back in 2013, but may now be coming to an end.

It is also worth pointing out that schools can be fully staffed in England by adjusting the curriculum, and dropping subjects they cannot staff. The other alternative, as OECD noted, is using less well-qualified staff. The figures on combined versus separate science at Key Stage 4 between different types of school are stark. The former can be staffed with teachers with less subject knowledge than the latter. If you don’t pass the 11+, you probably won’t study Physics as a subject by KS4 | John Howson

I was surprised that OECD appears to have accepted the DfE data at face value and not to have a definition that would deal with the fact that QTS is so broad as to be meaningless at both primary and secondary school levels.