Many years ago, I used to report monthly on the percentage of ITT courses with vacancies. This was a second and rather cruder measure of the state of recruitment into postgraduate ITT courses. The number of ‘offers’ is still the measure that I use in my regular blogs about the state of the market. I am delighted to see that the new owners of tes – Companies House sent me an update on their progress with the company last week – has flagged up the 24% decline in applications that was reported by this blog last week.

Anyway, I thought that I would have look at how many courses listed on the DfE application portal no longer had any vacancies. Of course, some of the ‘no vacancies’ might be because the course was no longer on offer, rather than because it was full. Either way, this is a measure of how hard an applicant might need to work to find a course with vacancies.

The following table shows the number of courses and the number of courses with vacancies at 14^th February, taken from an analysis of the DfE’s site.

Subject	Courses with vacancies	All courses	% with vacancies
Psychology	60	106	57%
Social Sciences	65	109	60%
Heath & Soc Care	22	32	69%
Physical education	389	541	72%
Dance	54	69	78%
Comms & Media Studies	30	37	81%
Economics	28	34	82%
Business studies	223	261	85%
Drama	295	336	88%
History	543	617	88%
English	688	772	89%
Design and technology	413	458	90%
Religious Education	419	461	91%
Modern Foreign Languages	832	915	91%
Art and design	425	467	91%
Music	343	374	92%
Computing	500	545	92%
Geography	601	651	92%
Biology	656	709	93%
Mathematics	777	835	93%
Chemistry	695	743	94%
Citizenship	17	18	94%
Physics	731	771	95%
Science	22	23	96%
Classics	18	18	100%
Latin	12	12	100%

Not surprisingly, of the subjects with many different courses on offer to applicants, physical education is the one with fewest remaining courses with vacancies. However, more than two thirds of physical education courses are still showing vacancies, and presumably accepting applications. In many subjects, including Art, more than nine out of ten courses are still listed as having vacancies. Even in history, 88% of the 543 courses are still shown as with vacancies.

Modern Languages consists of a number of different languages, and the position in each is as follows.

Subject	Courses with vacancies	All courses	% with vacancies
Russian	2	4	50%
Mandarin	20	25	80%
Italian	7	8	88%
German	207	233	89%
French	431	477	90%
Spanish	365	400	91%
MFL	253	269	94%
Japanese	5	5	100%

The small number of courses in specialist languages; Russian, Mandarin and Italian are faring relatively well. However, mainstream languages are in a similar position to most other secondary subjects.

What of the primary sector? Normally, by mid-February, many courses would have the ‘course full’ sign on the door. This year, as 14^th February, 86% of the 1,655 different course options across the primary sector still had the vacancy sign posted. This looks like rather a high number of courses with vacancies at this point in the recruitment cycle for the primary sector.

The data around courses with vacancies supports the view that 2022 has so far proved to be a challenging round as far as persuading applicants to train as a teacher is concerned. Whether it merits offering raffle prizes as an inducement will be discussed in a later blog.