The following piece first appeared in a recent SSAT Sunday Supplement piece

As recently as a decade ago, the process of advertising for teachers was simple. A school advised with its local authority HR department’s bulletin and paid for an advert in the TES. This ritual hadn’t altered much since the early 1990s when schools gained control of their budgets for the first time. However, much has changed in the past few years: tes is on its fourth set of owners, and now most schools pay a subscription fee; the DfE has entered the market with a job board; local authority job boards mostly don’t handle vacancies in academies, and recruitment agencies along with a plethora of new entrants on-line are seeking custom from schools with ever more eye catching products that are handling advertising and selection as a package.

After a lifetime in education, and forty years studying the labour market for teachers, I set up TeachVac to demonstrate what a low-cost model for advertising teacher vacancies, and indeed all vacancies in schools, would cost. Eight years on, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk handled 64,000 teaching vacancies in 2021, with more than 1,000,000 matches of interested teachers with schools.

As a spin-off to its main service, TeachVac provides significant data about the labour market for teachers. The remainder of this piece is about my predictions for the 2022 recruitment round for teachers in England. Necessarily, the comments will be general, but TeachVac has much more data that it can share with schools about local trends and matches being made.

Any current analysis of the labour market starts with the publication of the DfE’s latest ITT census of numbers on preparation courses to become a teacher (This appeared in December 2021). For the secondary sector, these trainees are mostly on course lasting one academic year. So, registrations for 2021 will be a major source of recruits for September 2022 vacancies. The other source of teachers are returners, whether from a career break or employed elsewhere, including teaching overseas and finally there are those teachers that are either switching jobs or seeking promotion.

Demand is led by an increase in pupil numbers, as in the secondary sector at present; departures, with any increase in departure boosting demand. At present, the growing international school sector is an important source of demand. One UK private school is to open its sevenths overseas campus in Tokyo. Another key source of demand is from teachers taking a career break. Finally, there are those leaving state schools for other employment in the private sector; further education or careers outside of education.

With a strong finish to 2021, and 8,000 recorded vacancies in January 2022, schools will need to pay attention to market trends if they are going to have a need to hire teachers in 2022. As the primary sector market for classroom teacher is well served with candidates, schools should not face issues at the national level, the secondary sector market is more complex and divides into three subject groupings.

Schools seeking to recruit teachers in subjects such as history, physical education, art and drama should face no issues at the national level, even for January 2023 appointments. At the other end of the scale are physics, design and technology, business studies and some of the specialist subjects such as law and psychology where recruitment is already challenging for some schools and all schools will face issues trying to recruit as 2022 progresses, and certainly for January 2023 appointments. All other subjects lie somewhere along this continuum, with some parts of the county experiencing more challenges that others, and some facing challenges earlier in the recruitment round, but all likely to face some difficulty for January 2023 appointments.

Schools that are better placed than others to deal with recruitment issues are those fortunate enough to be able to recruit trainees through school-based preparation programmes or Teach First. Next in line are those schools working with other training providers, such as universities, where they have access to links to students via mentors and school placements. Finally, those schools needing to trawl entirely on the open market are most in need of up-to-date information on the working of the labour market. MATs and MACs grouped close together geographically may be able to swop staff and certainly offer promotions to staff.

The ability to manage staff development is becoming increasingly important, as the DfE now realise, since several years of missed training targets are now affecting the market for middle leaders in some subjects and parts of the primary sector. The middle leader market is under-researched, but vital to the levelling-up agenda.

Finally, the market for headteachers in the secondary sector remains, as ever it was. Schools advertising at a sensible time of year and without specific demands usually manage to recruit. Recruitment of headteachers in the primary sector is more of a challenge, especially for faith schools in an increasingly secular society, and for specific types of school, such as infant or junior schools. Succession planning within MAT/MACs seems like a good policy at all levels, but especially for headships.

John Howson

Chair, TeachVac