TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has now completed its fourth recruitment cycle and is on course to handle 50,000+ genuine vacancies for teachers and school leaders across England during 2018. The vacancies come from all types and phases of schools and still cost schools and teachers nothing, either to place a vacancy or to receive a job match.

TeachVac is a defined system designed for those seeking a teaching or school leadership position in either the state-funded or private school sectors. Unlike other systems, TeachVac works with genuine job seekers that know where they want to work. The limits are generous, but our experience tells us that few job seekers are open to working anywhere in England. By using a defined system, where job seekers can change their parameters, we cut out those seeking to bombard schools with offers to fill their vacancies for a fee.

TeachVac trusts teachers and works to provide the information in the most accessible format while remaining free to both schools and teachers. As a future development of TeachVac the team are looking at two new developments. Firstly, where are the jobs most likely to be found? The answer to this question is based upon the data collected over the past four recruitment rounds. Although, if you are a teacher of mathematics, English and possibly the sciences, you can assume that there will be vacancies across the country that’s not the case in some of the smaller subjects.

How many vacancies will there be for music teachers west of Exeter in any given recruitment cycle: do business studies teachers find many jobs in the West Midlands? TeachVac now has sufficient data to answer this sort of question. The data is capable of further refinement, by perhaps, state-funded schools; selective schools or private schools.

Our second service in development is the ability to tell schools how many applications they might receive when posting a vacancy. Schools already receive notification of TeachVac’s estimate of the size of the remaining trainee pool when the post a vacancy and whether TeachVac has already recorded enough vacancies to exhaust the number of trainees likely to be granted QTS in this recruitment round. TeachVac can build on this by quantifying the size of the pool of active jobseekers matched with a vacancy as either good, average, poor or non-existent. Such a profile will help schools respond as quickly as possible when they need to consider making alternative arrangements, especially for an unexpected January vacancy.

For researchers, TeachVac has a considerable store of up to the minute data about the labour market for teachers. Below is the job history of one school so far in 2018 with repeat advertisements removed. In large departments such as English, mathematics, science and languages it is sometimes difficult to know whether a second advertisement following closely on from a previous one is a second vacancy or a repeat advertisement. If each vacancy had a unique reference number the problem would be solved and a more accurate tally of actual vacancies could be kept. TeachVac does not record vacancies not linked to a specific school.