Is £30,000 enough?

Posted on March 5, 2022 by John Howson

Congratulations to the team of civil servants at the DfE. Now that’s a sentence you probably didn’t expect to read on this blog. However, the detailed evidence from the DfE to the STRB issued yesterday 2022 pay award: Government evidence to the STRB (publishing.service.gov.uk) marks one of the most comprehensive analyses of the functioning of the labour market for teachers that has been published in recent years.

Perhaps, I can now retire, since the government has accepted almost everything that I have been pointing out for the past decade, and has also provided the evidence in minute detail that might provide some interesting posts for this blog over the next few weeks.

When a starting salary of £30,000 for teachers was first mooted, it was generous. Now with inflation running at a ten-year high, and the world looking like it might be facing a re-run of the 1972 oil price shock that led to a decade of high inflation and wage erosion, and incidentally did for the plans for much better CPD for teachers in the wake of the James Report, the £30,000 figure may not be as generous as intended. Time will tell.

There are two anxieties behind the good news. The first is whether small primary schools with falling rolls due to a decline in the birth rate will be able to afford the new pay structure? The DfE evidence could have done more to model this scenario, and the possible consequences for different parts of rural England in particular. Church schools in urban areas may also be affected.

My second anxiety revolves around the extent to which the DfE has taken on board the relationship between training and employment and the global nature of the teaching profession. Of course, a willingness to work overseas might change, but with the growth in international schools being largely outside of Europe, might mid-career teachers witnessing their differential to less experienced colleagues diminish consider whether they could earn more teaching overseas? Perhaps, TeachTapp could ask that question?

Schools can restore differential for mid-career teachers by the judicial use of Recruitment and Retention Allowances, and it is interesting to see how these have been used across England, with areas where the labour market is tight seeing schools more willing to use such awards. Of course, it also depends upon having the cash in the budget to be able to do so.

Schools in parts of South East England outside the London pay structure, but with strong competition from the private school sector, such as in Oxfordshire, may well also be concerned about the likely consequences of this pay settlement.

One sensible move that doesn’t need to STRB involvement, would be to better match training to employment to guarantee sufficient supply to all areas. At present, the supply pattern isn’t anywhere near as effective as it should be, especially with the levelling up agenda.

If you are interested in teacher supply, do please read the DfE evidence as it is well worth the effort.

Not the ITT data for any predictions

Posted on March 4, 2022 by John Howson

This isn’t the place to discuss a knighthood for a former Secretary of State for Education, except to say I haven’t been more surprised since the time when a Prime Minister knighted his raincoat maker.

I was almost as surprised to find the DfE publishing the February ITT applications data today. Well done for producing the data much faster than UCAS used to achieve. However, it is less helpful not to have a pre-announced timetable for these publications. If there is one, I haven’t seen it.

February marks the mid-point in the annual recruitment cycle, and is the month when it is normally possible to ‘read the runes’ and speculate on the final outcome of the recruitment round, and hence, the labour market for the following year.

At present, 2022 looks a lot like 2020 was at this point, but any predictions made that February turned out to be wide of the mark. I fear that with the war in Ukraine, any predictions this March based on the February data would only be on the basis of a ‘normal’ recruitment round. The remained of 2022 is not going to be anything like normal.

As a result, I am confining myself to saying that the indications to date are less interest from home students and that 10%+ of applications have come from applicants domiciled outside of England. This includes 482 applicants from Northern Ireland and 1,427 for the ‘rest of the world’ category. There have also been 318 applications from people in Wales to train in England.

An interesting piece of analysis made possible by the DfE dataset is the percentage of applicants offered a place, awaiting a decision and unsuccessful with their current application.

The offer category includes those shown as recruited; conditions pending; deferrals and received an offer.

Subject	% offers	% unsuccessful	% awaiting offer
Classics	26%	49%	26%
Music	26%	49%	25%
Business studies	15%	59%	25%
Design and technology	26%	53%	21%
Religious education	24%	55%	21%
Computing	18%	62%	19%
Drama	27%	51%	22%
Physics	20%	54%	26%
Art and design	25%	52%	24%
Geography	26%	52%	22%
Other	25%	57%	18%
Biology	21%	58%	21%
Chemistry	20%	56%	25%
Modern foreign languages	20%	52%	28%
History	25%	56%	18%
English	24%	58%	18%
Mathematics	20%	58%	22%
Physical education	24%	64%	12%

Source: DfE dataset

The table is ranked by the number of applications received, with the subject with the lowest applications at the top and physical education with 4,589 applicants at the bottom of the table. Interestingly, lots of applicants doesn’t always mean a high percentage of offers. Similarly, small numbers of applicants may also mean high percentage of unsuccessful applicants, as in physics (54%) and computing ((62%). Does this mean that quality is not being compromised, perhaps because of concerns over ofsted judgements? Perhaps, it means more and better applicants might come along later, so it is worth keeping places for them. Unsuccessful applicant percentages will increase as courses fill. Thus, physical education already has the highest percentage of unsuccessful applicants.

There are still lots of interesting data needed, such as ethnicity of applicants and their outcomes and outcomes by type of course. Perhaps providers could lobby for these changes?

Private schools: important sector of job market for teachers

Posted on March 2, 2022 by John Howson

Nearly one in five vacancies for teachers of mathematics that were advertised during the first two months of 2022 placed by schools in England came from private schools responsible for educating children of secondary school age. This included both senior and preparatory schools across England. However, the vast majority of posts from private schools were advertised by located by schools in London and the South East of England. There were relatively few vacancies from schools across the north of England.

The data produced by TeachVac, the national vacancy service for teachers, shows that the private sectors share of the job market for teachers so far in 2022 has increased from, around 12% of vacancies in the first two months of 2021, to 14% across the first two months of 2022.

Other subjects, apart from mathematics, where the private sector dominate the job market for teachers include, perhaps not surprisingly, classics, but also some posts for teachers of specific languages, including Russian, where there have been three recorded vacancies so far in 2022.

Schools in the state sector usually advertise for teachers of modern languages rather than for teachers of specific languages. The same balance between advertising for teachers of specific subjects and a generic vacancy is often also seen in vacancies for science teachers. Private schools favour vacancies for teachers of specific subjects, whereas state schools advertise for teachers of science, at least at the classroom teacher grade.

As with the state sector, there has been less demand for teachers of arts and humanities so far in 2022 by private schools. At least in England, this is not a part of the curriculum likely to absorb the over-supply of such teachers being trained at the public expense.

The next three months will cover the period between March and May when the majority of vacancies for teachers will appear. Nationally, across both state and private schools, and the primary and secondary sectors, nearly 20,000 vacancies for teachers have already been advertised in 2022 according to TeachVac’s records. 2022 might well see a total for the year of close to 70,000 unless demand falls away later in the year.

Should some universities decide to withdraw form government funded teacher preparation courses then they may well still be able to maintain initial teacher education by providing recruits for the private school sector. As academies don’t need to employ qualified teachers, any universities outside the government scheme can also provide new recruits for that sector, providing that a funding route can be found for trainees, perhaps based upon a greater use of a salaried scheme funded by schools. It would be interesting to speculate what such a divergence of public and private training might do for the levelling up agenda?

Levelling out

Posted on February 23, 2022 by John Howson

Under the government’s latest plans, I might not have gone to university. This was because I struggled to pass what was then ‘O’ level English. Fortunately, I found six different degree courses that didn’t make English ‘O’ level a requirement of entry. Even in the 1960s that was a bit of a struggle. However, LSE, with a large number of mature and non-standard entry students, was happy to review the person and not the exams that they had passed when considering who to accept.

My experience, more than half a century ago, made me think about today’s announcement that might be seen to threaten the autonomy of higher education institutions, if government funding is restricted to universities only accepting those with certain qualifications. Of course, there will need to be exemptions for young people with special educational needs. Hopefully, mature entrants also won’t be put off returning to learning by an overly difficult access programme, especially if they don’t have English and maths qualifications.

There are good reasons to expect a degree of literacy and numeracy of our graduates, even in subjects where, say, mathematical knowledge, might not be of any obvious use. With developments in technology, who knows what will be needed in the future in terms of skills.

More pernicious would be the reintroduction of student number limits just at the point the number of eighteen-year-olds is starting to increase once again. I titled this post ‘levelling out’ because any cap on student numbers will undoubtedly hit the most deprived hardest. UCAS recently reported that applications from those living in deprived areas, for university places in 2022, was on the increase. Disadvantaged students show confidence in applications as they approach exams | Undergraduate | UCAS “28% of young people from the most disadvantaged areas (quintile 1 using the POLAR4 measure) have applied – up from 17.8% nine years ago in 2013” according the UCAS Press Release.

Surely, the government doesn’t want to slam the door in the face of this growth in interest in higher education. Restricting the number of places at universities will increase the required criteria for admissions and that will certainly work against pupils in schools that are struggling to recruit teachers, either across the board or in certain subjects. Do we want to deprive these young people of the chance to attend a university just because an accident of birth?

A well-developed apprenticeship route is a necessary part of the education and skills offering, but a lack of money should not deprive anyone of a university education. It is bad enough being saddled with debt with punitive interest rates, but to be excluded from life chances because of the school you attended seems to be turning the clock back a long way further than is acceptable.

There are those that think too many already go too university and that they waste their three years partying and drinking, before starting a life on the dole. But, who would have thought studying a degree in video games a decade ago would have been the start of a billion-dollar industry?

Does anyone care about Design and Technology teaching?

Posted on February 19, 2022 by John Howson

It wasn’t just trees that were falling on Friday. Available new entrants for teaching jobs in September in design and technology hit new lows on TeachVac’s index.

Here is a snapshot of the first seven weeks of the year in terms of remaining trainee numbers in D&T matched to vacancies on a score of two vacancies means one less trainee available for future jobs.

Date	vacancies 2016	vacancies 2017	vacancies 2018	vacancies 2019	vacancies 2020	vacancies 2021	vacancies 2022
01/01/2021
08/01/2021	412.5	371.5	217	219	343	580	231
15/01/2021	399	356	201.5	202	312	561	178
22/01/2021	381.5	342.5	181.5	191	270	533	114
29/01/2021	370	321	172.5	131	226	503	53
05/02/2021	352.5	311.5	157.5	97	185	478	0
12/02/2021	341	290.5	141	74	136	444	-63
19/02/2021	332.5	286	126.5	44	78	427	-116

Source; TeachVac

Now we can debate the methodology, but it has remained consistent over the eight years, so even if the numbers are too alarming this year to seem to be credible, the trend is still there to see. The numbers in the table are for the whole of England, so some areas may be better, but others might be worse. The data doesn’t include Teach First or other ‘off programme’ courses that are not reported as a part of the core ITT Census from the DfE. The index does make some assumptions about completion rates based upon past evidence and that those on salaried routes won’t be looking for jobs on the open market.

Design and Technology is a portmanteau subject, and the data cannot reveal whether particular aspects are faring better or worse. Of course, some posts may attract art and design teachers, where there is no shortage of trainees, but they won’t help in any shortage of say, food technology teachers.

What’s to be done? First, there has to be an acknowledgement by policymakers that there is an issue before solutions can be found. Then, we need to ask, is this a subject we still need to teach in our schools? Will our nation be impoverished if it disappears? I think the answer to that is in the name of the subject.

Do we need a strategic approach that also recognises the current situation impacts upon the levelling up agenda cherished by the present government? In my humble opinion we do.

Perhaps the Education Select Committee might like to take an evidence session on the topic of ‘teaching D&T in our schools’. The DfE has this evidence now that it is managing a job board, so cannot claim ignorance of any problem. However, it can produce evidence to prove me wrong in my assertions in this post. Does ofsted have a role here? Should they conduct a thematic review of the teaching and staffing of D&T departments to advise Ministers?

How many of the trainees funded by student loans and public money end up in the private sector or in further education, or even teaching overseas? Do these losses compound the problem?

Finally, where do we go from here with Design and Technology, if I am correct in my judgement that the issue is now too serious to ignore?

opportunities for would-be teachers

Posted on February 15, 2022 by John Howson

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%

ITT courses – percentage with vacancies 14th February 2022

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%

ITT Modern Languages: courses – percentage with vacancies 14th February 2022

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.

Time for a radical rethink

Posted on February 14, 2022 by John Howson

How many years can the government continue to let the labour market for teachers remain relatively unregulated? After nearly a decade during which the supply of qualified new entrants into the teacher labour market across many secondary subjects has failed to meet the predicted demand, as measured by the government’s own modelling through the Teacher Supply Model, there must be a genuine discussion about the consequences of the failure of the labour market to work effectively, and what steps might be taken to help meet the policy objectives behind the operation of the teacher labour market?

Over the past few weeks, I have written two opinion pieces on the working of the labour market for teachers – both reproduced on this blog – and also witnessed the fact that education has been included as an important component of the government’s levelling up agenda.

Can you really level up outcomes if the labour market for teachers, a key resource; indeed, the key resource in schooling even today, is insufficient to meet the needs of a market that is no longer just regional nor even national, but increasingly global in its scope.

To be fair to the government, it has taken some steps to intervene in the market. The DfE job board was one step, although that just competes with the other existing providers and its use isn’t mandatory for schools. The iQTS qualification to be trialled this year, is another interesting response to the development of a global market for teachers. Previous interventions such as highlighting the ability of academies not to require QTS of its teachers and granting QTS to American and some Commonwealth qualified teachers have had little noticeable impact on the labour market. In part, this has been because of the visa system in place in England, and the operation of the Migration Advisory Committee in determining ‘shortage’ subjects.

So, what might the government do now? One area to consider is teacher preparation There is a policy for teacher preparation. However, it needs to be set against the trend in the school population over the next decade. The years of massive growth in the school population are now coming to an end, and once again stable or even falling pupil numbers across the system will have an impact upon training needs, if other factors affecting demand remain constant. However, it seems possible that schools might need to finance at least some of the future pay rises from within their budgets. In the past, such a strategy has reduced the demand for teachers. However, it also has an effect on the demand for those other than teachers working in schools.

Reducing numbers in training in popular subjects such as history, art and physical education in the face of reducing pupil numbers may mean painful decisions about whether small providers will want to continue offering courses, especially if there is also a squeeze on funding for training. Will the approach to policy continue to encourage schools to create training places for the requirements locally or recognise that larger regional units offer better prospects for research and development of pedagogy and links with subject departments, not to mention the sustainability of small subjects where group sizes are often unviable even when recruitment into training is buoyant.

These are not new issues; they appear every time there is a change in the direction of pupil numbers. The new factors this time are the levelling up agenda and the issue of who manages the administration of places; schools or other bodies, including higher education?

The other issue is how you manage the move from preparation to employment in the teacher labour market? Does the government have a role here? That’s a discussion for another day.

Funding schools: how far to hypothecate?

Posted on February 11, 2022 by John Howson

No sooner do we have a National Funding Formula for schools than it starts to dawn on some people that’ equal’ shares may not be the best way to achieve the policy goal of levelling up outcomes. How funds are distributed to schools are key to education outcomes, and have been ever since the State mandated schooling as the default position for the education of children whose parents did not, could not, or would not make other arrangements.

At the heart of the debate about the distribution of funds are two key principles: equity and the identification of the point of decision on how to spend funds. For much of the past 100 years the issues around the degree of hypothecation of funds was centre stage. With the devolution of budgets to schools in the 1990s, this issue was replaced for a long period by the debate over how much cash should be allocated to schooling.

Of course, the problem of creating an education system where all may enjoy success meant that the issue of how funds were allocated didn’t entirely disappear from the political agenda. However, the simple view of a hard National Funding Formula approach that put the view that ‘equal means the same for all’ centre stage – except of course that pay differentials and London weighting meant that it was never as simple as some would have liked – gained supremacy in thinking, although there were always other exceptions such as Education Opportunity Areas.

Funding policy is now under scrutiny once again, with the national levelling up agenda taking centre stage in the political agenda around policymaking. This policy hasn’t been fully worked through in terms of what it means for education and the hypothecation agenda. I wrote in an earlier blog post about how you enforce retention payments to teachers if that is a mechanism to be used in the prosecution of levelling up. Mandate schools and provide a hypothecated grant?

This week there have been two helpful additions to help the discussions on the funding debate. The House of Commons library has published a research briefing, excellent, as always, on School Funding https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8419/CBP-8419.pdf

Teach First, the charity whose aims now extend well beyond just training teachers to work in schools with high levels of disadvantage pupils, has published a report around rethinking the Pupil Premium Rethinking pupil premium: a costed proposal for levelling up | Teach First The Pupil Premium is, of course, a great example of a semi-hypothecated grant to schools, in that its criteria for distribution are made clear, but its actual use by schools is not determined closely as part of the funding.

At present, different rules also apply as between maintained schools and academies and Academy Trusts in how funds distributed through the National Funding formula may be aggregated to cover central costs. This is an interesting area of the hypothecation debate that merits further discussion.

But in the end, decisions about the allocation of funds will always be in the hands of those that provide the funding. Local council taxpayers can be grateful that funding schools is no longer a part of their costs in urban areas. In the countryside, and where there are large bills for special needs transport, it is a different matter, as school transport costs are left to local council taxpayers to cover.

Not much of a Christmas Present

Posted on February 10, 2022 by John Howson

There is a need to be cautious about making too much of the latest DfE data on applications to start graduate training as a teacher in Autumn 2022. The newly published data covers the period up to mid-January 2022. However, this included both the Christmas break and the omicron infection surge of covid cases plus the first Christmas break for the new DfE application process.

Any one of these factors might have been a reason for treating comparisons with previous years cautiously. Taken as a whole, there must be a view that it won’t be until the February data – the half-way point in recruitment – that a clear picture will emerge, especially because of the large number of applications awaiting a decision from a provider.

Nevertheless, some comments are possible. In the primary sector, applications are close to the level of January two years ago at 18,300. In reality, this is the lowest January number for many years for applications, but should not be a cause for concern. In the secondary sector, the 20,254 applications are some 2,000 below the 2020 figure for January and 8,000 down on the admittedly high 2021 number. Comparison with 2020 is probably more helpful. In terms of applicants, there were about 750 more than at this point two years ago, but some may be making fewer choices.

Translating the overall number of ‘offers’ into issues for individual subjects produces four different groups. Firstly, those subjects where ‘offers’ – note ‘offers’, not applicants as that data aren’t available – are up and the expected recruitment level should be met. Amongst the subjects tracked, there are no subjects in this grouping. Secondly there are subjects where there are more offers, but the recruitment level won’t be reached on present levels. Physics, design and technology and chemistry fall into this group.

The third group is where there are either similar offer levels to two years ago or fewer offers than at this point in the cycle two years ago, but recruitment targets should be met. History, physical education, biology and art fall into this group.

Finally, there are subjects such as languages, religious education, music, mathematics, geography, English, computing and business studies where ‘offers’ are below the same point two years ago and unless the number of ‘offers’ made picks up, recruitment target may well not be met. As noted earlier, this list should be treated with some caution for the three reasons stated earlier.

Slightly worryingly, the largest increase in applicants seems to be amongst those in the oldest age groupings, with 140 more applicants aged over 55 at the point that they made their application than two years ago. New graduates still form the bulk of the applicants, but the 2,989 age 21 or under compares with 2,830 two years ago from this age grouping: an increase, but not a massive endorsement of teaching as a career. For the 22-year-olds the increase is from 2,080 to 2,098: hardly noticeable. London and The South East account for around a third of applications. This is good news if there are sufficient places on courses and the applications are spread across all subjects, as these are the two regions where demand for teachers is at the highest levels.

In summary, there is a degree of caution about the data in this monthly release, but there is almost certainly work still to be done to avoid another year of under-recruitment and a tight labour market for schools in 2023.

The Labour market for Teachers in England – some thoughts for 2022

Posted on February 8, 2022 by John Howson

The following piece first appeared in a recent SSAT Sunday Supplement piece

As recently as a decade ago, the process of advertising for teachers was simple. A school advised with its local authority HR department’s bulletin and paid for an advert in the TES. This ritual hadn’t altered much since the early 1990s when schools gained control of their budgets for the first time. However, much has changed in the past few years: tes is on its fourth set of owners, and now most schools pay a subscription fee; the DfE has entered the market with a job board; local authority job boards mostly don’t handle vacancies in academies, and recruitment agencies along with a plethora of new entrants on-line are seeking custom from schools with ever more eye catching products that are handling advertising and selection as a package.

After a lifetime in education, and forty years studying the labour market for teachers, I set up TeachVac to demonstrate what a low-cost model for advertising teacher vacancies, and indeed all vacancies in schools, would cost. Eight years on, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk handled 64,000 teaching vacancies in 2021, with more than 1,000,000 matches of interested teachers with schools.

As a spin-off to its main service, TeachVac provides significant data about the labour market for teachers. The remainder of this piece is about my predictions for the 2022 recruitment round for teachers in England. Necessarily, the comments will be general, but TeachVac has much more data that it can share with schools about local trends and matches being made.

Any current analysis of the labour market starts with the publication of the DfE’s latest ITT census of numbers on preparation courses to become a teacher (This appeared in December 2021). For the secondary sector, these trainees are mostly on course lasting one academic year. So, registrations for 2021 will be a major source of recruits for September 2022 vacancies. The other source of teachers are returners, whether from a career break or employed elsewhere, including teaching overseas and finally there are those teachers that are either switching jobs or seeking promotion.

Demand is led by an increase in pupil numbers, as in the secondary sector at present; departures, with any increase in departure boosting demand. At present, the growing international school sector is an important source of demand. One UK private school is to open its sevenths overseas campus in Tokyo. Another key source of demand is from teachers taking a career break. Finally, there are those leaving state schools for other employment in the private sector; further education or careers outside of education.

With a strong finish to 2021, and 8,000 recorded vacancies in January 2022, schools will need to pay attention to market trends if they are going to have a need to hire teachers in 2022. As the primary sector market for classroom teacher is well served with candidates, schools should not face issues at the national level, the secondary sector market is more complex and divides into three subject groupings.

Schools seeking to recruit teachers in subjects such as history, physical education, art and drama should face no issues at the national level, even for January 2023 appointments. At the other end of the scale are physics, design and technology, business studies and some of the specialist subjects such as law and psychology where recruitment is already challenging for some schools and all schools will face issues trying to recruit as 2022 progresses, and certainly for January 2023 appointments. All other subjects lie somewhere along this continuum, with some parts of the county experiencing more challenges that others, and some facing challenges earlier in the recruitment round, but all likely to face some difficulty for January 2023 appointments.

Schools that are better placed than others to deal with recruitment issues are those fortunate enough to be able to recruit trainees through school-based preparation programmes or Teach First. Next in line are those schools working with other training providers, such as universities, where they have access to links to students via mentors and school placements. Finally, those schools needing to trawl entirely on the open market are most in need of up-to-date information on the working of the labour market. MATs and MACs grouped close together geographically may be able to swop staff and certainly offer promotions to staff.

The ability to manage staff development is becoming increasingly important, as the DfE now realise, since several years of missed training targets are now affecting the market for middle leaders in some subjects and parts of the primary sector. The middle leader market is under-researched, but vital to the levelling-up agenda.

Finally, the market for headteachers in the secondary sector remains, as ever it was. Schools advertising at a sensible time of year and without specific demands usually manage to recruit. Recruitment of headteachers in the primary sector is more of a challenge, especially for faith schools in an increasingly secular society, and for specific types of school, such as infant or junior schools. Succession planning within MAT/MACs seems like a good policy at all levels, but especially for headships.

John Howson

Chair, TeachVac