In a previous blog I looked at some aspects of the school workforce in England for the present school year. After looking at the data from the DfE’s January School Census of schools and pupil numbers, it is now possible to consider questions arising from the staffing of the present curriculum.
On average, each secondary school would have 68 teachers if you divided the number of teachers by the number of schools. Of course, that’s a mythical school, and the mean isn’t a very good measure of central tendency, but it is all we have that is easily accessible in the dataset.
So, how might our mythical school be staffed?
| Number of hours taught for all years | Number of teachers of all years | averages based on 3,456 schools | |
| Total | 3,807,978 | 234,406 | 68 |
| English Baccalaureate subjects | 2,412,756 | 164,487 | 48 |
| All Sciences | 667,237 | 48,386 | 14 |
| Other | 147,696 | 45,081 | 13 |
| English | 541,134 | 41,293 | 12 |
| Mathematics | 548,091 | 37,835 | 11 |
| General/Combined Science | 440,391 | 36,753 | 11 |
| PSHE | 78,595 | 35,988 | 10 |
| PE/Sports | 281,291 | 24,288 | 7 |
| History | 210,713 | 18,630 | 5 |
| Geography | 197,709 | 18,090 | 5 |
| All Modern Languages | 247,871 | 17,986 | 5 |
| Religious Education | 128,314 | 16,842 | 5 |
| Other/Combined Technology | 120,663 | 13,630 | 4 |
| Art & Design | 137,008 | 12,714 | 4 |
| French | 109,392 | 11,616 | 3 |
| Other Social Studies | 80,944 | 10,096 | 3 |
| Spanish | 97,234 | 9,538 | 3 |
| Business Studies | 89,685 | 9,331 | 3 |
| Drama | 83,026 | 9,199 | 3 |
| Computer science | 70,412 | 8,185 | 2 |
| Biology | 53,133 | 8,167 | 2 |
| Music | 87,461 | 7,610 | 2 |
| Chemistry | 48,774 | 7,245 | 2 |
| Design and technology – All | 52,737 | 7,203 | 2 |
| Physics | 43,405 | 6,242 | 2 |
| ICT | 36,875 | 5,530 | 2 |
| Media Studies | 23,871 | 3,945 | 1 |
| Citizenship | 8,955 | 3,941 | 1 |
| Careers and Key Skills | 7,430 | 3,554 | 1 |
| German | 25,580 | 2,955 | 1 |
| Other Humanities | 15,434 | 2,671 | 1 |
| Other science | 11,121 | 2,534 | 1 |
| Other Modern Foreign Language | 15,666 | 2,007 | 1 |
| General Studies | 3,072 | 1,856 | 1 |
The English Baccalaureate subjects account for the majority of the staff. Although design and technology only accounts for 2 teachers, if IT and other/combined technology and computing are added in the total increases to 10 teachers, not far short of the numbers for English and Mathematics. Of course, not all the teachers will be teaching the subject all the time, and this tells us nothing about how qualified they are to teach the subjects they are actually delivering? It would be interesting to know how many qualified teachers of physics (with a physics degree) are teaching in schools with the highest percentages of free school meals?
As previous blog posts have argued, the staffing crisis may be abating, but is not over. It is good to see the TES taking in interest in these numbers Teacher supply: why 5 subjects face gloomier forecasts | Te as well as making the DfE admit what this blog has thought for some time now that the pledge for 6,500 teachers was totally unrealistic. Falling rolls and budget constraints meant that it was always going to be a non-starter. Labour ‘abandons’ manifesto pledge to hire more teachers
John Howson 