Now that the DfE have taken over recruitment to postgraduate teacher preparation courses I have been looking at their web site of providers. On the whole it is a pastiche of the former UCAS offering, with the same faults and good points.

The key good point is that it is comprehensive and has a lot of different filters. Whether or not they are the filters applicants will want to use is another matter. On the downside there is no map of either location of courses availability of places.

Many years ago, universities leant that not having a place name in your title could be a disadvantage, as applicants might not consider you if they didn’t know where you were located. As a result, Trent became Nottingham Trent, and Brookes, Oxford Brookes. Of course, some universities can manage without a place name such as King’s College, London and University College, but they are both technically colleges and not universities.

How many applicants know that Orange Moon Education is offering Classics courses in Nottingham and Bristol and possibly Bradford as well unless they delve into the Orange Moon site or where The South East Learning alliance is offering training?

The last time the DfE was involved in the application process, when the School Direct Scheme was first established, the DfE included more data on the number of places still on offer from each course and the number filled on its web site. I always thought that was a useful tool for applicants as places filled to know the possible risk of applying to a nearly full course against applying to one with more places available.  However, long-time readers of this blog from 2013 will recall the difficulties that resulted from my use of the data on applications and places filled.

Some years ago, Chris Waterman worked with me to produce a book of maps showing the location of providers and their different type of provision. As a former geography teacher, I still think that some visual representation of provision would be useful. Such mapping might show potential trainees where the competition for jobs might be fiercest, especially if it was overlayed with vacancy rates for the different subjects and sectors.

It is interesting to see that as I write this blog in early November there is already a difference between the total number of courses available and the number of courses with vacancies on the DfE site. In design and technology, there are 443 courses listed, but only 426 have vacancies: 17 apparently don’t have vacancies. For physics, the numbers are 736 and 716, a difference of 20. This begs the question of, if there are only around 1,100 places to train as a physics teacher how many of the 736 courses are real opportunities and how many sub-sets of an offering with some slight difference, and does this matter? Around 8% of primary courses are currently not on the list for courses with vacancies.

By Christmas, the DfE will have a good idea of how the recruitment round is shaping up. With the international school job market opening up again, training teachers will become as important as filling the vacancies for lorry drivers for the future of our economy.