It is always interesting when large organisations validate comments made on this blog. The new NfER dashboard of historic data about teacher shortages certainly support the view of this blog that schools with high Free School Meals percentages may have more teacher turnover in recent years. Explore by school type – NFER

Interestingly, they also support the higher teacher turnover in London, noted by this blog from time to time. This dashboard is a useful addition to the data about teacher supply, but it does fall into the category of statistical information and not up to the minute management information. TeachVac, the job board for teacher vacancies that I help found has concentrated on the position here and now and linked it to data such as the ITT census and applications for training.

In the next few weeks, I will be putting together the reports on vacancy trends during 2022 for classroom teachers and school leaders after what has been a record-breaking year for vacancies. These annual reports should be available early in January 2023.

I hope as NfER update their dashboard that they will take into account the effects of the covid pandemic on the labour market for teachers.

If I have a quibble, the recent NfER document that cited the North East as an area of teacher shortage doesn’t seem to be borne out by the maps at district level. Only a handful of North East authorities recorded over 10% turnover of secondary teachers where as most inner London authorities breached that level. That outcome is what I would have expected from the TeachVac data on vacancies.

The only authorities where primary sector turnover exceeded 10% in 2020 were in Yorkshire and the Humber region, and not in the North East. Still, perhaps the survey returns for the earlier study could not be compared with this dashboard.

The subjects with the lowest leaving rates according to the dashboard as physical education and history: no surprises there. However, among early career teachers, physics was the subject with the third lowest departure rate after those two subjects. Perhaps when numbers entering ITT are low, those that do enter are the most committed to teaching as a career?

The presence of modern languages teachers and IT teachers at the top of the table is also probably not much of a surprise given their opportunities to use their skills elsewhere.

Those interested in the topic can thank NfER for producing data that the DfE really should provide as part of open government. Hopefully, this week the DfE will provide the data about applications to ITT in November. Last year, the data appeared on the 8^th December.