Monthly Archives: April 2021

Teacher Shortages in 2022?

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The present satisfactory state of recruitment into teacher training looks likely to be short-lived if the messages from this month’s UCAS data are interpreted in a particular way. After almost 30 years of looking at either weekly or monthly data on applications and acceptances, one can start to discern trends and patterns. Covid threw a spanner in the works of what was an emerging teacher supply crisis. Has that spanner now been retrieved?

One the one hand, applicant numbers are still up on last year. The increase is just over 5,000 for those with a domicile in England, from 26,280 in April 2020 to 31,460 this April. Interestingly, there has been virtually no increase in applicants from the North East, but a large increase in applicants domiciled in the London region. This should be good news, as it is in London that there is a strong demand for teachers.

More worrying is the relative lack of interest from new graduates in teaching as a career. There are only around 700 more new young graduates 21 or under this year compared with the same time in 2020, whereas there are 1,300 more in the 25-29 age group. Career changers, perhaps furloughed or made redundant by the pandemic, seem more interested in teaching than young new graduates. Indeed, there are only 60 more male applicants in the youngest new graduate age group than this time last year. A trickle rather than a flood.

The most worrying number is the drop in applications for design and technology, from 970 in April last year to 880 this April. In April 2019 it was 950, so the decline must be of concern. Applications to train as a languages teachers are also weak when compared with previous years. However, the increase in applications to train as a mathematics teachers from 5,390 last April to 7,450 this year is good news, as ARK noted in their recent ITT bulletin.

The bizarre over-recruitment of both history and PE teachers continues, with 1,500 offers in PE and 1,230 in history. This compares with 380 offers in physics, 230 in design and technology and 330 in computing.

School Direct Salaried as a route continues to decline, whereas School Direct non-salaried continues to grow, if not to thrive. Higher Education has done well in attracting applications for primary courses, up from less than 14,000 to over 18,000 this year. The increase is slightly less for secondary phase courses. Apprenticeships have taken up some of the slack from the School Direct Salaried route, but offers in the secondary sector remain derisory at this point in the cycle.

So, there will be problems in 2022 recruiting design and technology teachers, physics teachers and probably business studies teachers as well, but a glut of history and PE teachers in most parts of England.  This blog will look at the likely outcomes in other subjects once the trends of the next couple of months become apparent. We don’t expect a big rush into teaching unless new graduates suddenly discover there are no jobs elsewhere and turn to teaching once their courses have finished and they finally have a degree.

Reverter Clauses and school sites

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The Supreme Court only features rarely in posts on this blog. There was the case of the parent from the Isle of Wight that decided the issue of holidays taken in school terms, and the case relating to when criminal offences should be spent that affected both volunteers and employees wanting to work in educational settings.

This month, the Supreme Court has decided a case about the use of the proceeds of a school site at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire. The original site for the school was given to the local authority, not in the Nineteenth Century, when so many sites were, but in the 1920s and early 1930s, when the local Elementary School needed to expand and required more land for new buildings.

Eventually, that site needed to be replaced as well, and the County Council purchased an adjacent site and built new school buildings. The school moved into the new buildings leaving the former site vacant. The County sold the vacant former school site to developers. The successors of the original grantor of the land for use as a school then claimed the proceeds of the sale under the reverter clause, as the land was no longer being used for a school.

The Supreme Court had to decide who benefited from the proceeds of the sale; the County Council or those entitled if the reverter clause came into effect? Lower courts had decided first one way and then the other. You can read the judgement of the Supreme Court at https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2019-0062-judgment.pdf

The court’s conclusion was that:

51. We conclude that, having regard to the purposes of the 1841 Act, Richard Spearman QC, at first instance, was correct to hold that, when section 14 is invoked, it is not necessary for the site to be sold before the school is moved to another site and closed on the site given by the grantor. Accordingly, we would allow this appeal.

In essence, this turned on a decision of how to interpret legislation, albeit in this case a piece of legislation 180 years old. As a young undergraduate in the 1960s at LSE, I took a first year course in constitutional law and I still recall the lecture on the rules of interpretation: in those days, as I recall, it was one of; the Literal Rule, The Golden Rule or the Mischief Rule.

In this case, the Supreme Court seems to have said that a piece of legislation must be read ‘in the round’ and that by doing so it places less weight on the Literal Rule. Applying Clause 2 of the legislation without Clause 14 being taken into account would have returned the land to the heirs of the grantor, but Clause 14 anticipated that there might be a need for a school to be rebuilt on a different site and created situations where to do so did not lead to a reversion of the land to the grantor or their heirs.  

This legislation is of especial interest to the Church of England as many of their schools were built on land granted under transfers, with a reverter clause attached if the site was not used for specific purposes, such as education. If the current downturn in the birth rate and a National Funding formula that makes small rural primary schools no longer viable over the next few years, then there might be more cases coming to court to settle who receives the proceeds of the land on which a school once operated.

New readers start here

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There are a bumper set of local elections across England on 6th May. Some people are finding their way to this site as a result of the fact that I am defending my county council seat in Oxfordshire and also standing as the Lib Dem candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner in Thames Valley – as I did in the previous two elections for this post.

To help those reaching the site as a result of wanting to know more about my published views on this blog, I have brought together some links to posts over the years. Some are more personal than others.

Over time views may also alter as circumstances alter. Thus schools becoming academies is now a different matter to the situation when this blog first started.

Any way here are links to some posts you might want to read first:

https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/knife-crime-must-be-tackled/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2014/05/09/knife-crime-do-we-need-mandatory-sentences/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2019/08/11/rods-poles-and-perches/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/support-youth-justice/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/11/14/isolation-poor-use-of-funding/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/05/03/upturn-in-average-number-of-young-people-in-custody/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/supreme-court-one-parliament-a-half/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2021/01/23/time-for-jacobs-law/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/memories/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2019/04/05/a-parent-in-prison-is-not-a-crime/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/crime-and-a-lack-of-learning/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-responsibility-of-us-all/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2016/12/16/thank-you-mr-taylor/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/can-we-halve-the-number-of-women-in-prison/
https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/youth-numbers-in-custody-halve-in-a-decade/

There are rather more than I remembered writing, but with more than 1,100p posts I guess that isn’t really a surprise.

What about Middle leaders? Is there a concern about recruitment?

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When there is a mis-match between the numbers of teachers required in certain subjects to meet the identified need by schools to staff a curriculum area various strategies are used to ensure that schools can deliver their timetables. One such strategy is using teachers with less than ideal subject knowledge until a better qualified teacher can be recruited.

However, if there is a shortfall in training, what are the consequences some years later for the recruitment of middle leaders in the subject? Design and Technology makes an interesting case study that I have used before. As a subject, it regularly fails to recruit sufficient trainees to meet the government’s target, especially since the demise of most of the undergraduate routes some years ago.

The UCAS data for the end of the 2020 cycle (discussed in an earlier post) provides data on the number of trainees recruited. (I could use the DfE’s ITT Census, but as this is not a subject that features much in Teach First numbers, the UCAS data covers most trainees).

Design & TechnologyRecruited into training*After 5% wastage
2014470447
2015530504
2016405385
2017300285
2018295280
2019400380
2020615584

*Source: UCAS end of cycle for trainee numbers

The table shows the changes in recruitment over the past seven years with the figure for an assumed 5% non-completion of the course.

So how many middle leaders might be required in this subject? Using the TeachVac database, it was possible to identify some 390 promoted posts in the subject advertised by schools across England in 2020. After removing those linked to specific parts of the subject, especially food technology, where the promoted post may be as much a recruitment incentive as a real middle leadership position, there were 300 posts for middle leaders in the subject. After allowing for re-advertisements, of which it can be estimated that there were about 60 during the year, this meant around 240 likely vacancies for middle leaders of design and technology.

How long does a teacher need before being ready for middle leadership? This is not an easy question to answer. For the sake of this exercise, let’s start by assuming 5 years. Thus the training cohort of 2014 might have been in the market for middle leadership positions in 2020. Assuming 450 entered teaching, (447 rounded up), and demand was 240, this would mean nearly two teachers from that cohort for each vacancy for a middle leader.

Now followers of the labour market for teachers will know that retention is an issue. After five years of service, perhaps a third of those entering teaching are no longer teaching in state schools. So, we need to discount the 450 by a third. The new total is 315 for 240 vacancies; a much less healthier pool from which to draw middle leaders.

Fortunately, 2014 was a relatively good year for recruitment into training. What will happen when the 2017 cohort reach five years of service in 2023? Assuming the same level of wastage, there might be only around 200 teachers left from that cohort. Hopefully, demand for middle leaders will be lower, but if it is similar to the estimate of 240-250 vacancies for 2020, then looking down the road a bit, some schools are going to have a real recruitment problem in the middle years of the decade.

Solutions include persuading more from earlier cohorts to take on middle leadership, even if they were previously reluctant to do so; accelerating the newer cohorts into leadership – not possible until the 2019 and 2020 cohorts come through; merging design and technology with say, art and design where supply of middle leaders is better, into larger faculties offering a better career prospect.

Different schools will adopt different tactics, and some may also offer better salaries than in the past through larger TLR payments.

So, should there be concerns about the supply of middle leaders? I think there ought at the very least, to be some discussion about the issue, and which schools might be most affected by any possible shortages?

Baroness Williams of Crosby

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I am saddened to hear of the death earlier today of Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby.

Baroness Williams was one of the founders of the SDP and had previously been an education secretary during the Labour government of the late 1970s. Created a Life peer in 1993, Baroness Williams played an important background role in education for the Party in her role as a senior politician of wide experience. Her great speaking ability motivated many audiences in both the conference hall and at fringe meetings during many Liberal Democrat conferences over the years. She finally retired from the House of Lords in 2016, but remained an inspiring figure for many in the Liberal Democrats.

In a blog post when another Liberal Democrats stalwart of the House of Lords, Baroness Sharp of Guildford retired, I paid tribute to these two Peers along with Annette Brooke the former MP. All were important for the Liberal Democrats in the field of education, from early years to higher education.

I first encountered Shirley Williams when she was Secretary of State for Education. She initiated The Great Debate in Education on the back of the Prime minister’s famous Ruskin College speech. This was the start of the shift from a national service locally administered to a nationally driven education service that we now have in England. I had achieved some notoriety after appearing in the national press and was invited to several media events where Shirley Williams was the speaker. I especially recall one such event in the Royal Institution where she was opposed Norman St John Stevas, possibly one of the best Secretaries of State we never had.

It was Shirley William’s misfortune to be secretary of State when the government of Jim Callaghan was teetering on the edge of collapse. She had to endure the ‘winter of discontent’ and during that period she failed to stop the caretaker’s strike in Haringey that lead to several weeks of school closures.

Although successful in taking North Yorkshire County Council to court over the need to create non-selective education in Ripon, it was too late in the parliament and the life of the Labour government for any action to be taken on the result that backed the government’s view of the 1976 Education Act, and so, along with the other selective schools that she tried to convert to comprehensive education, selective education still remains in that part of Yorkshire, helped by Mrs thatcher’s prompt repealing of the 1976 Act as one of her first actions as Prime Minister.  

Shirley Williams was an inspiring orator and a joy to listen to when speaking at Liberal Democrat events, either extempore or from a prepared speech. She was not a good timekeeper and was often late, but nobody ever seemed to mind. She was also a great European and had the courage to from a new political party. Along with many other, I will miss her.

UCAS end of 2020 cycle ITT data

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UCAS has today published the end of cycle data for courses that started last autumn. Regular readers that follow this blog will know that much of what is contained in the data has been commented upon in posts on this blog la the August and October.

However, ‘The End of Cycle’ (EoC) report contains much more information than the regular monthly updates published during the cycle. One area is in that of the ethnicity of applicants and the percentages accepted. Why gender is seen as capable of being revealed each month and ethnicity is not is an interesting question. I assume it is down to the fact that numbers in some categories would be too small to make publication viable or appropriate.

Regardless of the reason, the EoC report contains some interesting data.

Accepted percentages 2020 from UCAS PG ITT data
MaleFemaleAll
Black37%53%48%
Other41%51%48%
Asian50%61%58%
Not Stated55%57%56%
Mixed [sic]58%62%61%
Total63%70%68%
White67%74%72%

Source: UCAS

Black male applicants had less than a four in ten chance of being accepted on to a course compared with 74% of white females that were accepted. It would be interesting to drill down into these figures to see whether there are regional and subject/phase differences within the categories.  

My assumption would be that London courses perform well in terms of acceptance of ethnic minority candidates and those courses in regions furthest from the capital may attract few applicants from ethnic groups other than the White group. This can pose another issue if a few courses receive the bulk of say Black African Male applicants. The policy should be to take the most suitable applicants.

I don’t know how much effort the DfE puts into monitoring these statistics and how they respond to the outcomes? Are civil servants content with the disparity between the different groups or should more work be undertaken to reduce the differences across gender and ethnicity?

Male applicants domiciled in London had one of the lowest acceptance rates overall for me of just 50% of applicants. It would be interesting to cross-tab the domicile by region with ethnicity. By contrast, 86% of women applicants domiciled in the north east appear to have been accepted That seems like a high figure to me and it would be interesting to see how many of these were accepted before say, Christmas. Providers that fill courses quickly can save time and money but such a practice begs the question about whether there should be a closing date for applications to allow more equal chances not determined by how quickly you decide upon teaching as a career.

DfE and Teacher Vacancies: Part Two

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The DfE is spending more money supporting their latest venture into the teacher recruitment market. Schoolsweek has uncovered the latest moves by the government to challenge existing players in this market https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-leans-on-mats-to-boost-teacher-job-vacancies-website-take-up/ in an exclusive report.

The current DfE foray into the recruitment market follows the failure of the Fast Track Scheme of two decades ago and the Schools Recruitment Service that fizzled out a decade ago. The present attempt also came on the heels of the fiasco around a scheme to offer jobs in challenging schools in the north of England that never progressed beyond the trial phase.

The present DfE site rolled out nationally two years ago this month. How successful it has been was the subject of a Schoolsweek article earlier this year. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfes-teacher-job-website-carries-only-half-of-available-positions/  This blog reviewed the market for vacancy sites for teachers last December, in a post entitled Teacher Vacancy Platforms: Pros and Cons that was posted on December 7, 2020.

In that December post, I looked at the three key sites for teacher vacancies in England. TeachVac; the DfE Vacancy site and The TES. As I pointed out, this was not an unbiased look, because I am Chair of the company that owns TeachVac. Indeed, I said, it might be regarded as an advertisement, and warned readers to treat it in that way.

There is an issue with how much schools spend on recruitment of teachers. After all, that was why TeachVac was established eight years ago. The DfE put the figure in their evidence to the STRB this year at around £75 million; a not insubstantial figure.

Will TeachVac be squeezed out in a war between the DfE backed by unlimited government funding and the TES with a big American backer? At the rate TeachVac is currently adding new users, I don’t think so. After all, the DfE site doesn’t cover independent schools, and in the present market I believe that most teachers want a site that allows access to all teaching jobs and not just some. That benefits both TeachVac and the TES as well as other players in the market, such as The Guardian and Schoolsweek, as well as recruitment agencies.

How much the DfE will need to spend on ensuring they cover the whole of the state-funded job market in terms of acquiring vacancies by the ‘school entering vacancies’ method is another interesting question? As is, how much will it also cost to drive teachers to using the DfE site and not TeachVac or the TES?

A view of TeachVac’s account reveals that Teachvac provides access to more jobs for teachers at less than the DfE is going to spend on promoting their site over the next few months. Such spending only makes good commercial sense if you want to remove a player from the market.

So here’s a solution. Hire TeachVac to promote the DfE site and use the data TeachVac already generates to monitor the working of the labour market. After all, that was also one of the suggestions from the Public Accounts Committee Report that spurred the DfE into action and the creation of their present attempt at running a vacancy site.

DfE and Teacher Vacancies: Part One

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In my previous post I discussed the issue of the DfE’s vacancy site and how by viewing it a page at a time resulted in duplication of some vacancies and the inability to see other vacancies. I asked the DfE to shed light on the problem by submitting a Freedom of Information request (FOI).

I have reproduced the DfE’s response below.  Essentially, the DfE site seems sound except for anyone undertaking the view of the site by the means that I selected. Since my purpose was to check how many non-teaching vacancies were listed on the DfE site, I had no other option but to use the method of viewing the site I selected.

Those using the sorting by closing date will discover another wrinkle, but I will leave you to do so if you are interested.

The DfE site has hit the headlines in a Schoolsweek exclusive https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-leans-on-mats-to-boost-teacher-job-vacancies-website-take-up/ TeachVac’s contribution to the story can be found at https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfes-teacher-job-website-carries-only-half-of-available-positions/

I will discuss the possible implications for the teacher recruitment market in my next blog. But, here is the DfE’s response to the FOI.

Thank you for your request for information, which was received on 15 March 2021 and assigned case number 2021-0017953. You requested the following information:


On the DfE vacancy site for teachers: https://teaching-vacancies.service.gov.uk/
1. How many of the published vacancies on 16th March or nearest available date with data were duplicated; and,
2. What was the number of unique vacancies on that day for teachers in institutions operating under schools regulations displayed on the DfE Vacancy site after excluding Sixth Form Colleges, other Further Education institutions and any private sector institutions and posts not requiring a teacher such as, but not exclusively, Teaching Assistant, cleaner, Examinations Officer and cover supervisor? Vacancies providing services across MATs and not linked to a specific school should also be excluded from the total provided.

I have dealt with your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“the Act”).


For context, the total number of live vacancies on Teaching Vacancies on 16 March was 1,386. As of 1 April, there are 2,330 live vacancies on Teaching Vacancies.

1. How many of the published vacancies on 16th March or nearest available date with data were duplicated?


For the purposes of this request, we have considered a ‘vacancy with data duplicated’ to be a vacancy with the same job title as another vacancy published by the same organisation which was also live on this date. The total number of vacancies meeting this definition on 16 March was 37 (2.7% of all live vacancies).

2. What was the number of unique vacancies on that day for teachers in institutions operating under schools regulations displayed on the DfE Vacancy site after excluding Sixth Form Colleges, other Further Education institutions and any private sector institutions and posts not requiring a teacher such as, but not exclusively, Teaching Assistant, cleaner, Examinations Officer and cover supervisor? Vacancies providing services across MATs and not linked to a specific school should also be excluded from the total provided.


Further Education institutions and private sector institutions are not permitted to list roles on Teaching Vacancies. Technical restrictions are in place to prevent this.


The total number of live vacancies on 16 March that were not at sixth form colleges, across a MAT or at multiple schools was 1,344 (97% of all live vacancies). Of these, the number of vacancies ‘requiring a teacher’ was 1,169 (87% of these live vacancies).


For the purposes of this request, we have defined ‘requiring a teacher’ as a listing with a job title containing the phrase ‘teacher’, ‘head’, ‘principal’ or ‘ordinat’ (as in coordinator or co-ordinator), but not containing any of the phrases ‘TA’ (in upper case only), assistant (but not in conjunction with ‘head’ or ‘principal’), ‘intervention’, ‘admin’, ‘account’, ‘marketing’, ‘admission’ or ‘care’. Structured data is not available on whether roles require a teacher, because the relevant fields are either optional for schools to complete or do not exist because they relate to vacancies that are not within the service’s Terms & Conditions. To obtain this information, vacancies have been filtered by relevant words and phrases. As a result, some teaching roles will have been excluded in counts of non-teaching roles and vice versa.