Last year, 2022, saw a large increase in recorded vacancies for teachers. That increase has continued in the first six weeks of 2023. TeachVac has recorded a 31% increase for the period from the start of January up to 10^th February 2023. Recorded vacancies for the secondary sector increased from 8,617 to 11,304 with increases in most subjects except; classics, economic, sociology and Engineering. Increases in music were in the order of 50%, and 59% in geography.

Although the increase in computing vacancies was only 41%, such was the lack of recruitment into training for courses that started last September that there will shortly have been sufficient advertised vacancies to provide a post for every trainee likely to be available for September. Design and technology, as a subject, is in a similar situation, even though a few more trainees were recruited in 2022 than in the previous year.

Business studies has already recorded enough vacancies for every trainee to have been able to find a job. Schools now recruiting for that subject will find the task ever more of a challenge as the year progresses.

For those of us that regularly watch the labour market for teachers, the question must now be; how accurate a reflection of reality is the current market data? Indeed, is measuring vacancies any longer a worthwhile exercise? Are schools just re-advertising vacancies that they cannot fill or advertising posts they expect to have to fill to try and capture the small number of candidates actually looking for vacancies?

Normally, I would not expect new entrants to the profession to have started job hunting this early in the year, except in subjects such as history and physical education where the supply of candidates regularly exceeds the number of vacancies on offer and it makes sense to start job hunting early.

In a ‘normal’ year there might be around 60,000 vacancies across both the primary and secondary sectors in England and including both state and private schools. The 100,000+ of 2022, and the increase early in 2023, suggests that there must be a considerable amount of either repeat advertising or re-advertising, depending upon how those terms are defined.

This blog has long championed the need for a unique vacancy number to follow a post from creation to its being filled. The current market makes that concept even more pressing. Schools do not need to wait for the DfE to create an elaborate structure, but could start using their URN followed by 2301 so the first vacancy would be xxxxxx/2301 and their tenth xxxxxx/2310. If included somewhere on the advertisement such reference number would be easy for followers of the labour market to handle and would provide a much clear picture of the actual labour market rather than having to wait until the June following the start of the school year and the publication of the data from the School Workforce Census.

Maybe, the government doesn’t want real-time information on the labour market, but without out it schools are at risk of having to rely upon signals from a false market that does not accurately show the real level of demand for teachers.