How challenging is teacher recruitment?

The staffing crisis in the NHS often receives more publicity than the festering crisis in teacher recruitment. This week, TeachVac has supplied data for articles in tes, and by the Press Association. The latter story make many local newspapers, but little impact on the broadcast media that still seems obsessed with the NHS.

Next week, TeachVac will publish its two detailed reviews: one on the labour market for school leaders and the other looking at the labour market for classroom teachers during 2022. Schools signed-up to TeachVac’s £500 recruitment deal for unlimited matches of their jobs can ask for a free copy of both reports. Copies are priced at £100 for each report to non-subscribers. www.teachvac.co.uk

Both reports comment on what is now history. January marks the start of the key recruitment round for September 2023. As part of its data collection, TeachVac, where I am chair, monitors its collected vacancies against the numbers recorded in the DfE’s annual ITT census of trainees. Of course, some of those trainees are already in the classroom on programmes that mean they will be unlikely to be job seeking for September in any large numbers. TeachVac’s index takes these numbers into account when calculating its end of week numbers.

Despite only being at the end of week 2 of 2022, I thought it might be useful to compare 2023 with 2022 at the same point. When looking at the table, it is worth recalling that in many subjects the number of trainees is lower than it was last year, so the supply side is reduced. As a result, it would take a reduction in demand for the index to improve on week 2 of 2022.

Subject13th January 202314th January 2022Difference
Computing76%90%-14%
RE80%93%-13%
Business Studies70%82%-12%
All Sciences85%92%-7%
Music84%91%-7%
Languages87%94%-7%
Mathematics87%93%-6%
English87%93%-6%
Geography87%92%-5%
Art93%97%-4%
PE96%98%-2%
D&T73%75%-2%
History97%98%-1%
Source TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk

Sadly, the reduction in trainee numbers hasn’t been offset by any reduction in demand: quite the opposite. All the subjects in the table are indicating a worse position at the end of week 2 in 2023 than at the same point in 2022; even history.

Design and technology’s apparently favourable position is due more to how badly it was faring in 2022 than to any real improvement, as it still has the second lowest index score in 2023, only business studies – the DfE’s forgotten subject – is in a worse position, and will certainly register an amber warning of recruitment challenges by next Friday.

Indeed, computing and design and technology will both also almost certainly have posted amber warning by the end of week 3! Several other subjects might have amber warning in place by the end of the month.

I am sure that the worsening trend in recruitment is why schools and MATs are signing up to TeachVac’s recruitment offer. At less than £10 per week for all a schools’ vacancies to be matched to TeachVac’s database, with no extra work required by the school than doing what it already does, must be the best deal in town. Schools not signed up with TeachVac will no longer see their vacancies matched each day. The fee for primary schools is just £75.

School Leadership trends in 2022

This week TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has published its 2022 Review of Leadership Vacancies in schools across England. Next week, the report on classroom teacher vacancies will be published. If you would like a copy of either then email enquiries@oxteachserv.com Schools signed up to the TeachVac platform can request a copy of both reports.

These are challenging times for the public sector. Education, and in particular schools, has not escaped the challenges of a period of high inflation and full employment. However, the most serious effects in schools are to be found at classroom teacher and middle leader levels and the recruitment of non-teaching staff. These will be discussed in a future post once the Classroom Teacher Review of 2022 is published.

Leadership vacancies are mostly filled by those already working in schools or other posts in the education sector. Headteacher posts are frequently the final post in a teacher’s career, although some headteachers do change schools, often from a smaller school to a larger school, specially in the primary sector.

TeachVac’s main findings for 2022 are that:

  • There were more leadership vacancies on offer during 2022 that during the previous two years, when recruitment was badly affected by the covid pandemic
  • In the primary sector 2034 headteacher vacancies were recorded during 2022, compared with 1,556 during 2021. In the secondary sector, the numbers were 585 headteacher vacancies in 2022 compared with 368 during 2021.
  • For schools advertising during the 2021-22 school-year there was a re-advertisement rate for primary schools of 25%, and 19% for secondary schools. The South East was the region with the highest re-advertisement rate for primary headteachers
  • Schools advertising for a headteacher outside of the first quarter of the year were more likely to need to re-advertise their vacancy, as are schools that differ from the norm in size, type of school or control by a faith grouping.
  • After two years of lower vacancy number for deputy headteachers, 2022 levels recorded a rebound to pre-pandemic numbers across both the primary and secondary sectors.
  • There was a strong demand for assistant headteachers in both the primary and secondary sectors during 2022. The grade is now popular in schools across more regions than previously.
  • One effect of the covid pandemic may have been more retirements of senior leaders. Any effects resulting from ‘long covid’ on the labour market for senior staff in schools is yet to be fully appreciated. 

Readvertisement rates are for the 2021-22 school year to allow for re-advertisements during the autumn term to be included in the totals. Re-advertisement rates in the primary for headteacher vacancies are towards the lower end of expectations, whereas re-advertisements for secondary headships are at a percentage more in common with long-term trends.

The most interesting statistic is the increase in vacancies for assistant heads during 2022. Is this because middle leaders of large departments need the salary available on the Leadership Scale to attract them to apply for such posts, especially in high cost areas in and around London? Some of the increase may be due to new schools building up their leadership teams, but that fact alone does not seem sufficient to account for the increases.

What will 2023 bring in terms of leadership vacancies? As around half of such vacancies appear during the first three months of the year, we won’t have long to wait to find out.

Is your school using TeachVac?

Created eight years ago, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has already matched nearly 4,000 teaching posts so far in 2023 with teachers and other interested in filling these jobs.

After eight years of being a free service TeachVac now charges secondary schools less than £10 per week -£500 per year plus VAT – for matching all their teaching posts for a year with its ever growing database of new and experienced teachers and recruitment companies. Primary schools pay £75 per year and can be free to academy trusts and other groups of schools that sign-on together with at least one secondary school.

Schools can sign up on the website – use the button to start the registration process or email enquiries@teachvac.co.uk and the staff will answer any queries about the service.

As TeachVac has traditionally had more jobs that the DfE site, it is a better place for jobseekers to register to be sent the links to jobs that meet with their specifications and a few that they might not have thought about. New registrations are being added to the list of those matched with vacancies every day.

With 75% of the teaching posts in 2023 posted by schools in or around London, schools in London, the south East and East of England should be at the front of the queue in signing up to TeachVac. Can you afford to miss out on access to the jobseekers in TeachVac’s database that receive relevant new jobs every afternoon. www.teachvac.co.uk

As an example, those teachers looking for a maths teacher post in North London will have received details of 14 different vacancies over the past two days from TeachVac. If your school isn’t using TeachVac then your vacancy won’t have been one of these sent to TeachVac’s users, if you posted one.

TeachVac is looking to use the income from schools to expand into offering a similar service for non-teaching posts and if enough schools sign-up the additional cost would be minimal. In the school-term, where schools offer a visa service for overseas applicants we will be introducing that fact into the matching service shortly.

TeachVac’s users are loyal, with 75% of all registered users still receiving daily matches,. This allows teachers considering a  move or looking for promotion to monitor the job market in the area where they are interested in working. Feedback tells us teachers used TeachVac to secure their job.

However, there are shortages of teachers in some subjects and TeachVac acknowledges that fact. But by not using the TeachVac platform for less than £10 per week schools can miss out on TeachVac sending their job details to those that are registered with TeachVac. Is it worth the risk for just £10 per week?

Tomorrow, TeachVac will publish an analysis of the first two weeks of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022 and compare the position with the government’s ITT census of trainees expected to be job hunting for a September 2023 post. The figures in some subjects will look extremely worrying.

Maths for the Millions*

Nobody can have been surprised about yesterday’s announcement about extending the learning of mathematics for all up to age 18. In 2017, Prof Adrian Smith was commissioned to write a report for the government reviewing the state of post-16 mathematics.

The relevant paragraphs of this report said;

33. There is a strong case for higher uptake of 16-18 mathematics. Increased participation would be likely to deliver significant payback in terms of labour market skills, returns to individuals, increased productivity and longer-term economic benefits.

34. The government should set an ambition for 16-18 mathematics to become universal in 10 years. There is not a case at this stage, however, for making it compulsory.

Smith review of post-16 mathematics: report and letter – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The Minister that responded on behalf of the DfE was, of course Nick Gibb, once again ensconced in Sanctuary buildings, so perhaps the emergence of this policy must have been expected.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are not enough teachers and lecturers in mathematics at present to provide for universal education for all 16–18-year-olds; Smith’s report identified that three-quarters of 16-year-olds with an A*-C in mathematics didn’t continue to study the subject at Key Stage 5. However, the government has done more to upgrade the qualifications of those teaching mathematics post initial teacher training over the past few years than in probably any other curriculum area. But not enough to balance current demand with supply, let alone to meet the increase in demand universal provision for all students at Key Stage 5.

Was the singling out of mathematics by the Prime Minister a message that the notion of a wider Baccalaureate qualification was no longer on the policy agenda?  Who knows, but as a story, it did manage to gain traction as a reverse ‘Jo Moore’ good policy story on a day when the Prime minister was faced with a raft of bad news stories about the economy and the public sector.

TeachVac  www.teachvac.co.uk has calculated that there are only around 1,500 trainee mathematics teachers this year currently in training to work in secondary schools, plus an unknown number training to work as lecturers in the further education sector, including those training ‘on the job’.

TeachVac has also calculated that there were more than 9,000 advertised vacancies for teachers of mathematics placed by schools across England during 2022. Even allowing for the repeat and re-advertisements, there doesn’t yet seem to be enough supply of teachers of mathematics to meet current needs, let alone increase demand by mandating the teaching of mathematics to all at Key Stage 5.

Nevertheless, the government does recognise that in our increasingly technological world, an increased understanding of mathematics to a higher level is important for ever more people in society. As I have mentioned before, the 19th century market porter became the 20th century fork-lift truck driver, and is now the 21st century software engineer writing code to manage robots in an automated warehouse.

It will be interesting see where this policy goes. Will it be a one-day wonder, or will Prof Smith’s Report finally become accepted as necessary policy for a modern first world economy?

* With apologies to  Lancelot Hogben 

Happy New Year: we can but hope

For most of the past 30 years, I have spent the week between Christmas and New Year drafting annual reports on aspects of the labour market for teachers during the previous 12 months for TeachVac’s and its predecessors, and also making a prognosis of what might happen in the labour market during the year to come. The finished reports; one on classroom teachers and promoted posts, and the other on leadership scale vacancies should, this year, be completed by the middle of the month.

Headlines include the steep increase in recorded vacancies across all grades during 2022; and the fact that schools in an around London recorded more vacancies than schools elsewhere in England. The problems, although not confined to the secondary sector are worse in that sector than in the primary school sector, where pupil numbers are now falling across much of England.

Of more interest that what happened in 2022 for most readers of this blog is, no doubt, my predictions for 2023. Based upon the trainee numbers in the DfE’s ITT census as a starting point, and abstracting those trainees already in the classroom and less likely to be job hunting, at least for a teaching post, for September 2023 from the totals, the numbers must be of concern.

After factoring in non-completions; those seeking posts in Sixth Form Colleges or elsewhere in publicly funded education outside of schools; and allowing for the demand form the private school sector, especially in the south of England, where a large number of such schools are concentrated; the final numbers may be the worst this century.

If the London region is taken as an example, using 2022 vacancies as the basis for the calculations, and assuming 40% of classroom teacher vacancies are taken by new entrants to the profession, with the remainder filled by those returning to teaching or switching schools, then some subjects do not have enough trainees to meet the possible demand from London’s schools

Open MarketLondon Vacancies in 202240% Vacancies from TraineesRemaining Trainees % Open Market Remaining
Business Studies164837335-171-104%
Religious Education249715286-37-15%
Computing304818327-23-8%
Music2285112042410%
Design & Technology3728293324011%
Physics3667442986819%
Geography52391436615730%
Modern Languages60099039620434%
Biology49574429819740%
English1214162965256246%
Chemistry64474429834654%
Mathematics1467151860786059%
Art & Design44043517426660%
History95040216178983%
Physical Education129522690120593%
Source TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk

Business Studies, religious education and computing might be the most worrying subjects for London schools seeking to fill vacancies. Of course, a school advertising in January will always fare better than one looking for an unexpected appointment for January 2024 late in the autumn, but schools should not need to be worrying about filling vacancies advertised as early as February this year.

TeachVac is increasing its registers of teachers looking to be matched to jobs, and secondary schools wanting their vacancies matched can sign up for £10 a week (£500 per year plus VAT) or miss out on this resource that aims to match 15,000 teachers this year. Sign up at www.teachvac.co.uk

ITT applications better: but not good enough

Despite this week being a holiday period for most people, the DfE has published the data about ITT applications up to 19th December 2022. This is the second monthly set of data about applications for 2023 courses. While December is still too early to be certain about the outcome of the recruitment round, it is now possible to see the strength of the interest in teaching as a graduate career at the start of the recruitment round.

The headline is that as far as offers are concerned most subjects have made more offers that at this time last year, but generally fewer than in December 2020. However, some subjects such as religious education, computing, drama, history and physical education have made fewer offers than in December 2021. For history and physical education, the number of offers is probably not of concern since traditionally both these subjects over-recruit against any DfE number supplied for the Teacher Supply Model. For the other subjects, the lack of offers this early must be of some concern since they failed to reach expected levels last year, and the mountain is now looking even steep to climb during 2023.

The total number of applicants by 22nd December was 12,897 compared with 12,310 on the 20th December 2021. This year the applicants generated 33,688 applications compared with 32,016 at December 2021. It is welcome that both these numbers are up this year, but the increase is not enough to suggest that there will not be concern about meeting targets during 2023.

More worryingly, only 196 applicants have been ‘recruited’, although the number of candidates with ‘conditions pending’ is similar to the number in December 2021. Fortunately, the number of candidates that have received and offer and are yet to respond is up by several hundred on the December 2021 figure.

The total number of applications for secondary courses is up on December 2021, by around 2,000 while the number of applications for primary courses is down by nearly a thousand to 14,500. More disturbingly, the number of unsuccessful applications for secondary courses is up from 8,377 in December 2021 to 9,654 this year. Some of these applicants may still find a place though the Apply 2 route later in the recruitment round.

More than 10% of candidates this year are classified as having applied from ‘the rest of the world’. The increase in this group masks the fall in applicants from London; the South East and the East of England regions. As these three regions are the parts of England struggling most to recruit teachers, the loss of potential candidates for 2023 is a matter of concern although applications to these regions are higher than last year, possibly boosted by the increase in overseas applicants.

Applications from candidates age 22, probably recent graduates or those graduating in 2023 are slightly down, applications from most other age groups are at similar levels to last year.

Higher Education courses remain buoyant, with all other types of courses also recording more applications. Of the 196 applicants so far ‘recruited’, 181 have been recruited by higher education providers to their courses.

Two swallows don’t make a summer, and two months data may not represent the rest of the application round, but, unless there is a significant upturn in applicants to secondary courses during the first eight months of 2023, the outlook for courses in autumn 2023 will not be much better than the dismal numbers recorded in the recent DfE ITT Census for courses that started in autumn of 2022. Such an outcome would imply another challenging labour market for secondary schools in 2024 that is unless school funding for future pay awards was such as to drive down demand for teachers to cover the increased pay awards.

Best wishes to DfE Vacancy site

It is time to wish the DfE Vacancy site all the best for the festive season. The DfE vacancy site is a good place to look for non-teaching posts: TeachVac doesn’t cover these vacancies at present, but is seeking to do so during 2023 using new investment funding. As of this morning, 37% of the vacancies on the DfE site were for non-teaching appointment, and a small percentage of the teaching posts were actually ‘job opportunities’ rather than stated jobs.

One non-teaching post that caught our eye, and illustrates the challenges such a site faces was posted by a selective school, although it could have been posted by any school.

Job details Chef de Partie Tournant

Job role

Working pattern

  • Part-time – 30 hours per week, Mon-Fri, 8.30am-2.30pm, term time only (38 weeks). Some flexibility will sometimes be needed to alter hours for occasional school events.

Contract type

Permanent

Full-time equivalent salary

FTE £20623, with the opportunity to rise to £21879 depending on performance

Actual salary

£14266 (rising to £15135)

What skills and experience we’re looking for

We have an exciting opportunity to join our in-house kitchen team. You will be using your skills to prepare and serve food throughout the school day, so that we offer students a varied, wholesome and tempting balance of foods. This role makes a vital contribution to nurturing students’ life-long interest and independence in making healthy eating choices. We are looking for an individual who can bring good humour, strong communication skills, flexibility, and attention to detail to the kitchen.

The salary works out at £12.51 per working hour, and unlike most in the catering trade there presumably will be no opportunities for tips on top. With the present recruitment challenges in the hospitality area, good luck to the school that is also seeking housekeeping staff.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that the limitation of the DfE site means that the job role appears under Learning support, cover supervisor or tutor – none of these classifications really fit the job description.

How does the 1,488 teaching vacancies on the DfE site compare with TeachVac today? The TeachVac counter is currently showing 3,834 teaching jobs, so more than double the DfE’s total. To be fair to the DfE they don’t include vacancies for teachers in private schools, and they may have different cut off dates for the length of time a vacancy is listed.

However, if you were a teacher job hunting which of the two free sites would you choose to register with? If you know which school you want to work in, and that school uses the DfE site, you can choose either site. However, if you have any degree of uncertainty, TeachVac has provided more opportunities.   

Schools should note that in 2023 their jobs will only be matched if they register with TeachVac and pay an annual fee of £500 maximum for secondary schools, and £75 for primary schools, payable for new registrations from February 2023. Vacancies at other schools will continue to be logged, but not matched with candidates.

The staff at TeachVac, http://www.teachvac.co.uk where I remain as Chair, wish all readers the best for the festive season and we look forward to 2023; may it be a better year than the one just ending.

Making money from Education

At this time of year, the DfE publishes data about the success of the education sector in generating income from exports. The income can be as a result of students from overseas – traditionally excluding EU students – coming to study in schools; colleges; universities or language schools. Set alongside that is the physical export of goods and services to customers in the education sector overseas. The latest data release covers 2020 and must, therefore, be considered an abnormal year because for much of that year the covid pandemic severely affected opportunities for income generation. UK revenue from education related exports and TNE activity 2020 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

 The recorded income for education exports in 2020 was some £25.6 billion pounds; up from £25.4 billion in 2019. To put those figures in some form of context, it was estimated that the Track and trace system for tracking covid possibly cost the government and taxpayers more than £30 billion over two years according to many reports on the web.

Higher education was the largest earners, responsible for £19.5 billion of export revenue. In comparison, Further Education, which consists of non-EU students only, accounted for £0.2 billion. The flow of overseas students into the further education sector these days probably doesn’t even warrant being called a trickle.

The income generated from Education Products and Services and Trans National Export activity was broadly similar, at around £2.1 billion and £2.3 billion worth of revenue generated, respectively. English Language Training and Independent Schools generated £0.5 billionand £1.0 billion, respectively. While the contribution from language training has been either static or declining in recent years, down from £2.23 billion in 2010 at current prices, income across the private school sector dipped from it record level of £1.05 billion in 2019, to £1.01 billion in 2020, presumably because of covid affecting the number of new registrations. On the other hand, TNE activity continued to increase, from £2.19 billion in 2019 to £2.28 billion in 2020.

Over the period between 2010 to 2020, the share of Higher Education to the total revenue from UK education related exports and TNE activity has increased by 16.3 percentage points from 60.0%to76.3%.

UK TNE activity increased by 2.2 percentage points over the same period from 6.7% to 8.9%. The share of English Language Training (ELT) and Further Education (non-EU students only) have both fallen by 12.2 and 5.2 percentage points, respectively: the ELT share dropping from 14.0% to 1.8% and the Further Education share dropping from 5.8% to 0.6%.

In 2020, international (EU and non-EU) Higher Education students at UK universities generated an estimated £18.0 billion in exports through living expenditure and tuition fees (£15.9 billion in 2019), which accounts for around 70.2% of the total value of education exports and TNE activity (62.6% in 2019). Overseas students are now clearly a vital part of the income stream for UK higher education institutions and have helped to cross-subsidise home students where fee levels have not kept pace with increases in costs.

The remaining £1.5 billion of exports revenue generated from Higher Education is made of research contracts and other exports income. 

With the development of national programmes, such as the new Oak Academy, there must be scope to increase ethe income from experts within the education sector. Should overseas students decide to seek university places in other English-speaking countries and avoid UK universities, this might be of great concern to that sector and its funding.

Why TeachVac is important

Earlier this month I posted about the ITT Census of trainees published by the DfE. I noted in one post that it was necessary to remove from the ITT census those trainees not likely to be looking for a teaching post because they are already in a school on salaried schemes.

From the reduced total also needs to be removed a percentage for in-course wastage and a desire by some teachers to work outside of the state school system in either private schools or Sixth Form/further education colleges.

What is left is the free pool that might look for a teaching post anywhere.

SubjectOpen Market
Mathematics1,467
Physical Education1,295
English1,214
History950
Chemistry644
Modern Languages600
Geography523
Biology495
Art & Design440
Other387
Design & Technology372
Physics366
Computing304
Drama304
Religious Education249
Music228
Business Studies164
Classics52
Total secondary10,054

From the list it seems clear that there are unlikely to be enough new entrants to satisfy the demand for teachers by schools in 2023 unless there is a substantial pay rise for teachers or other demands upon funding dampen demand below the level seen in 2022. To some extent demand will be affected by the actions of teachers already in the workforce. Early retirement, plus income from tutoring and some ‘supply’ teacher work might look attractive to some teachers in the latter stages of their career and with enough pension rights to feel confident about leaving full time teaching.

At TeachVac www.teachvac. We help match teachers to vacancies that meet their needs. Price at just £500 per year for secondary schools and just £75 for primary schools TeachVac has made 2 million matches in 2022 from over 100,000 vacancies listed and our pool of teacher sis growing rapidly at the present time as teachers start to think about where and what they want to teach in September.

Schools signing up to TeachVac now, won’t be invoiced until February and thus need not pay until early March. By then, they may well have already received more than 500 matches that covers the annual fee making all further matches effectively cost free.

Widening QTS but not to all

My attention has been drawn to this excellent BBC article about the extension of QTS to qualified teachers from a wider range of countries. UK Teachers QTS programme: United Kingdom teaching opportunity for Nigeria, Ghana and odas – Wetin to know – BBC News Pidgin

The article is in Pidgin, but easily readable by anyone that uses English as their everyday language. Michael Gove, when Secretary of State extended the right to QT from teachers qualified in certain counties including, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the USA. EU and EEA teachers had right of access under the free movement of labour rules while the UK was part of the EU.

Now countries such as

South Africa,

Ghana,

Zimbabwe,

Nigeria,

Ukraine,

Singapore,

Jamaica, India, and

Hong Kong

Will be afforded similar rights to apply for recognition as Qualified Teachers, if qualified and with a minimum period of experience. Routes to qualified teacher status (QTS) for teachers and those with teaching experience outside the UK – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The extension of the list raises interesting questions. The first is whether the Home Office, keen to reduce inward migration will offer visas to teachers from these countries before any arrival. No doubt teachers from Ukraine and Hong Kong, here as refugees will find the process of gaining employment rights easier than teaches from soe other countries on the list?

There is also the issue of whether taking qualified, and potentially experienced teachers, from other countries might affect teacher supply in those countries, especially if they too are facing teacher shortages either generally or in specific areas of the curriculum.

I also wonder why some other countries are not included on the list. There don’t seem to be any Caribbean States listed despite the high training standards for teachers that some such countries enjoy. Neither is the Indian Sub-continent and its various countries included.

It will be interesting to see how much difference widening the net will make to the 2023 labour market for teachers. As noted in the previous post, training to be a teacher in England seems like an attractive proposition for more applicants designated as from ‘rest of the word’ than in the past. Maybe teaching in England, despite the high cost of living as salary and working conditions teachers and not to mention the weather will see a boost in interest from nationals of the newly recognised countries for QTS; especially where they already have relatives living in England.