Category Archives: employment

Still a recruitment challenge in 2017, for some if not all

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At the end of September, I posted a blog with my predictions about recruitment against target for ITT graduate courses that started this September, excluding Teach First. I had expected Teach First to meet its targets, but seemingly it didn’t and that hasn’t helped the overall percentages. Nevertheless, how did I do?

You can check the original post at https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/small-fall-in-applicant-numbers-for-graduate-teacher-preparation-courses/ or use the sidebar to navigate to September 2016.

My original predictions and the outcomes appear below. I wrote in September that:

As far as individual secondary subjects are concerned, this has been a better year for applications in many subjects than 2015, although the increase has not be universal. The actual outcome won’t be known until the ITT census in November, but on the basis of this UCAS data it appears that the following might be the outcome in relation to the government’s Teacher Supply Model number (minus the Teach First allocation, where applications are not handled by UCAS).

Art & Design – acceptances above 2015, but not likely to be enough to meet the TSM number. Only 82% of target was met – worse than I expected, but should still be enough to satisfy demand in 2017 from schools.

Biology – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. Very strong recruitment reaching 115% of target, the second highest percentage of any subject this year. Some trainees may struggle to find jobs in 2017.

Business Studies – acceptances above 2015, close to TSM, but the TSM isn’t large enough to meet demand from schools for these teachers. Only 85% of places filled. I was slightly over-optimistic. On basis of last two years of data schools will find this is not enough trainees to meet demand. DfE must explain why the subject doesn’t rate more support?

Chemistry – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. As indeed it almost did with 99% of target met. Schools should find recruitment easier in 2017 than in previous two years.

IT/computing – acceptances below last year and not enough to meet TSM. Only 68% of places met, so the latter part of 2017 might challenging for schools looking for an IT teacher for January 2018, but it depends upon overall level of demand that has fluctuated from year to year more so than in some other subjects.

Design & Technology – the position is unclear from the UCAS data, but TSM may not be met. In fact outcome was a disaster, with only 41% of target places filled. The UCAS data system must allow this fact to be tracked and the DfE must consider whether financial support is sufficient. If not, it must be questionable whether the subject or at least some aspects of it will survive in schools much longer.

English – acceptances similar to last year and should meet TSM number. Here recruitment controls seem to have worked better than in some subjects, with 98% of target met. Those schools without School Direct or Teach First trainees may struggle to fill vacancies later in the year in 2017, since only 25% of trainees are in higher education courses and 15% are on Teach First, with a further 20% on the School Direct salaried route. This is more than double the number in any other School Direct salaried subject.

Geography – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. In fact target was passed, with 116% recruitment, higher than in any other subject. This should mean schools have little difficulty recruiting in 2017.

History – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. Target exceeded and 112% recruited. No real excuse for this overshoot, especially as only 30% are in higher education courses. Some trainees will struggle to find teaching post in 2017 unless there is a surge in demand.

Mathematics – acceptances above last year, but probably still not enough to meet the TSM number. And that was the outcome. A good year all round and had the target not been increased there would have been an overshoot on the target of 2015. Do bursaries work here and will there be an issue about extent of subject knowledge of some trainees? This outcome poses problems for the Migration Advisory Committee in reference to whether the subject should still qualify for tier 2 visa status?

Music – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number. Sadly, it didn’t and the target was missed by 10%, although that is only 40 trainees. Higher education courses account for half of trainees and there are too few School Direct Salaried trainees to count. Some schools may struggle to recruit in 2017, especially for January 2018 appointments.

Physics – acceptances above 2015, but probably still not enough to meet the TSM number. And that was the outcome, with only 81% of places being filled. Higher education accounted for more than half of the 2016 cohort of trainees. Schools will still struggle to recruit the 444 trainees not in school-based courses. The independent sector may absorb a large proportion of these trainees.

Physical Education – acceptances below last year due to the effects of the recruitment controls, but should be enough to meet TSM. There was still over-recruitment, despite the controls, and perhaps 500 trainees will struggle to find a teaching post in their subject tin 2017.

Religious Education – acceptances below last year and not enough to meet TSM. Only 80% of places were filled with higher education recruiting a very high percentage of the trainees (60%) and Teach First and School Direct Salaried routes  contributing realtively rew to the trainee count Schools will find recruitment more of a challenge as the year progresses.

Languages – difficult to determine exact position from the UCAS data, but should easily meet TSM number on the basis of acceptances. In fact, 95% of places were filled although 59% of these were in higher education institutions. On the basis of 2015 and 2016, the number of trainees overall will be sufficient, but whether they have the languages needed is another matter and I am not sure anyone actually knows.

So, the predictions weren’t too far out. That’s a relief. The outcome shows some schools will face recruitment challenges in 2017 and for January 2018 unless their financial situation deteriorates, so as to reduce demand.

What happens to retention will also be another significant factor in determining recruitment. However, pupil numbers at key Stage 3 are on the increase, so unless class sizes also increase that may create further demand. From that point of view, any weakening in the demand from the independent sector because of fewer overseas students would be helpful. However, the sinking pound makes UK schooling cheaper to buy for many that want it for their children.

In all, 2017 will be, not a disaster, but a challenge, more so for some schools than others and the government is by no means off the hook in terms of solving the recruitment issue.

 

Overseas teachers help take the strain

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Unemployment in Europe may have been been driving teachers to work in England. Figures released today by the DfE as part of the ITT statistics for 2015/16  https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/initial-teacher-training-trainee-number-census-2016-to-2017 show that record numbers of teachers from Spain (1,977), Greece (572) and Romania (431) were awarded QTS. There were also 545 teachers from Poland, although that was a small drop on the record number (580) of teachers from Poland recorded as being awarded QTS in 2014/15. Interestingly, only 274 teachers were recorded as being awarded QTS from the Republic of Ireland despite this group of teachers often being cited as helping solve the recruitment crisis.

Of course, being granted QTS doesn’t mean a person is actually teaching in a state-funded school or even a school and no figures have been published for those that originally trained in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland where school systems are increasingly different to those in England.

Although numbers from the Commonwealth countries, with a right to convert a teaching qualification into QTS, were higher in 2015/16 than the previous year, they only totalled 1,652 plus a further 379 that had qualified in the USA and gained QTS under the Gove changes. There may, however, be others teaching on a temporary basis that haven’t bothered to obtain QTS. Overall, 5,032 teachers from overseas were shown as being granted QTS in 2015/16. There isn’t a breakdown by either primary or secondary, or by subject, or where in the country they were teaching. All potentially useful facts to help understand the use of overseas teachers.

Many of these teachers will be subject to visa restrictions once the UK leaves the EU, if free movement of people is restricted. It would have been interesting to have seen the data on tier 2 visas issues by the Home Office as a part of this statistical bulletin. As far as I am aware, the Migration Advisory Committee has yet to rule on the future of teaching and tier 2 visas.

The data issued today in the ITT census will make it more of a challenge to retain either biology or chemistry in the list of eligible subjects, as biology exceeded recruitment targets by 15% and chemistry recruited to 99% of their target. Physics, although more trainees were recruited than last year, remains a challenge with 19% under-recruitment. In mathematics, the target was increased by 500, so although more trainees were recruited there was still a 16% shortfall against target. Whether this is enough to keep the subject as a Tier 2 visa subject depends upon whether the evidence on vacancies and trainee numbers indicate a shortfall in numbers. I guess everyone agrees there are issues to do with quality and there are clearly regional shortfalls. However, the MAC usually only considers the national picture.

As recruitment for 2017 has already started a decision on any changes to visa regulations is really needed quite soon if there is not to be confusion for September 2017. The influx of teachers from overseas is the other side of the coin of teachers from England going to teach elsewhere in the world. On these figures the outflow is likely to be larger than the numbers recruited from overseas.

Teacher Supply: my current thoughts

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This week the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Teaching Profession and SATTAG (The Supply & Training of Teachers Advisory Group) both hold their autumn meetings. The 2016 ITT census appears next week, so teacher supply is likely to be on the agenda one way or another for much of the rest of the month. At some point in the future the Migration Advisory Committee will presumably publish its findings on visas and shortage subjects.

This time last year I told the Select Committee there were three possible sources for a crisis in teacher supply; geographical, numerical and quality. Now, while the numbers crisis may have eased in some subjects, and could be seen to ease further when the 2016 census appears, the other two reasons for a crisis may not have altered very much. To these can be added a fourth, whether more teachers are leaving state-funded schools after a couple of years in the profession? The evidence, although a lagging indicator, certainly seems to point in that direction.

So, will the situation in teacher supply worsen or continue to improve over the next few years? The jury is out at this point in time as the different factors are finely balanced. On the one hand, the global economy could slow down reducing job opportunities for graduates. There is also the issue of tightening school budgets, coupled with actual losers in any new funding formula that together might reduce demand for teachers. Should teachers finally be offered a pay rise of more than one per cent in 2017, then that might further reduce demand.

On the other side of the equation, pupil numbers are rising and the increase will start to be felt by secondary schools, especially in and around London for the next few years. The Capital and the surrounding Home Counties are already the areas most affected by teacher turnover and possible supply issues.

The effects of School Direct and the expansion of Teach First have been patchy to date. Schools in those programmes may benefit from their involvement and can also use the ‘free pool’ of higher education trained teachers where they cannot recruit trainees through these routes, whereas schools that don’t benefit from these programmes must, perforce, use the ‘free pool’ to recruit. I am not sure the effects of this approach have been fully researched yet, but the government must ensure all can have teachers if it is to do its job properly.

On balance, it seems the teacher supply situation could go in either direction: worsen for the seventh year in some subjects in 2017 and affect recruitment until 2018, or ease further in some subjects, but worsen in others. The world economic situation is likely to be the key determinant of what happens and the world may be overdue for a slowdown.

A final point to consider is that the number of eighteen year olds going to university isn’t going to increase over the next few years as the cohort size is affected by the demographic decline now coming to an end in our secondary schools among the younger age groups. Add in a loss of teachers from the EU, post the UK’s departure, and, whatever the world situation, we may create our own national teacher supply problems. To that extent it will be interesting to read the Select Committee Report when it appears as well as the deliberation of the Migration Advisory Committee.

 

A shortage of leaders?

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Is there a shortage of school leaders that will become even worse over the next few years? This was the gloomy message from the report issued on Friday jointly by Teach First, Teaching Leaders and the Future Leaders Trust. https://www.teachfirst.org.uk/sites/default/files/The%20School%20Leadership%20Challenge%202022.pdf

As someone that has spent more than thirty years looking at leadership turnover, I have read the report, whose analytical support was provided by McKinsey, with interest. The report calls for a range of different interventions under four main headings:

  1. Develop a new generation of school leaders
  2. Expand the pool of candidates for executive roles
  3. Drive system change to support leaders more effectively and provide clear career pathways
  4. Build the brand of school leadership

These required interventions reflect the lack of government action ever since the Labour government abolished the mandatory NPQH qualification for headship and the coalition created many new leadership posts with the development of MATs and executive headships. The latter issue has been dealt with by this blog in previous posts, most notably in July this year with the post headed ‘Can we afford 2,000 MATs?’

The figures in Friday’s report, if accurate, are challenging with, it is suggested, a possible shortfall of more than 20,000 leaders in the coming decade. Now that may be the case, but it depends upon all the factors identified by the compilers of the report coming true. As noted, the greatest risk is the uncontrolled expansion of MATs creating a significant number of new posts.

While in the school sector, the growth in pupil numbers may lead to a development of more assistant head roles to recreate those abolished when roles were falling the likelihood of that happening is probably going to be governed by the degree of finance available to schools; a point largely ignored by the writers of the report. The report also misses the extent to which assistant head numbers have been inflated by what are essentially difficult to fill middle leadership posts such as head of mathematics and science departments being paid as assistant headship in order to be able to recruit to those positions.

Where I am with the writers of the report is in the need for creating not so much clear career pathways, they already exist, but in helping young teachers and especially returners develop the necessary skills to be appointed to a leadership post. With teaching increasingly a profession for women in both primary and secondary schools, someone, and it may be the three groups that commissioned this research, has to develop a strategy that allows the very large number of young women now in the profession to take up leadership roles both before and after any career breaks. If the profession doesn’t do that then we truly will have a crisis in a few years’ time.

One solution suggested by the report is to recruit outsiders to senior posts. I doubt that will work for most headships. In the past when asked my view of this solution by journalists, I have always asked if I could become their editor with no knowledge of journalism. You can image their answers.

Where I do think there is a possible direction of travel is for larger MATs. After all, there are example of CEOs of MATs currently without either any or any recent school experience. The larger the organisation the more leadership requires general not specific knowledge. Teaching and learning can be the responsibility of a second tier officer, whereas overall strategy remains the responsibility of the CEO. In effect, CEOs of MATS become very similar to Superintendents of US School districts, some of whom are recruited from the worlds of business and commerce.

Where you cannot recruit easily from outside the profession is where the leadership role requires hands-on experience of teaching and learning.  Despite the comments in the report, the majority of problems in recruitment in the past has been in the primary sector where the ratio of deputies to heads is much smaller than in the secondary sector.  Filling a faith school headship in an inner-city schools seeking a new head teacher in April has always been a challenge. This report doesn’t show whether it as actually any harder than it was twenty-five years ago.

In summary, the report is helpful in reminding everyone of the need for sufficient good leaders for all our schools and some of the risks ahead. The need for action over preparation is also vital, but the report doesn’t deal with who should take on the task? Presumably, the three organisations that put their names to the report would all like to play a part.

 

 

 

 

Pension Fund concerns

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No, for once this isn’t about the Teachers’ Pension Fund, partly because there isn’t one: the government pays the difference between receipts paid into the scheme and the pensions payable to pensioners each year. There is an issue about why private schools are in the Scheme, but that may be for another post.

This post is about the report by UHY Hacker Young, the national accountancy group that was released earlier today. According to the authors, the Local Government Pension Scheme fund deficits around the country have increased between 75-100% on average over the last year, following Brexit-related market turbulence. This change affects all academies directly because nearly all non-teaching staff in schools are members of these schemes, unless they have chosen to opt out. As academies publish accounts each year, the scale of their deficit is easy to uncover

I raised concerns about growing deficits among academies in Oxfordshire earlier this year at a meeting of the county council, as they are the body that administers the scheme. Apparently, in 2013 the DfE gave some form of guarantee about under-writing the deficit. However, that seemingly has yet to be challenged, presumably because if an academy changes hands the deficit just passes to the new body running the school. I am not sure what has happened when a school closes completely as happened with at least one UTC in the West Midlands.

Of course, pension deficits are to some extent an a figure on a balance sheet of the type accountancy standards require, but most ordinary mortals pass over very quickly and nod sagely when it is explained to them at the meeting where the annual accounts are presented and discussed. However, with staff costs making up around 75% of the total costs of the average school, according to UHY Hacker Young, something will eventually have to be done to prevent these deficits overwhelming the education budget as a whole, so trustees might want to start asking questions when the accounts are presented to them later this term for sign-off.

As UHY Hacker Young explain:

“Pension deficits fluctuate each year according to market rates and other complex assumptions, however the trend over recent years, even before this latest increase, has been upwards. A deficit means the pension fund does not currently have sufficient assets to pay pensions that will fall due in the future to retired staff, so trustees are rightly questioning how the gap will be funded and where costs can be cut to plug the deficit.”

One option would be for the government to nationalise the fund rather than continue to allow a significant number of different local authority schemes to operate. This would, presumably, reduce the cost of administration, but some well-run schemes might see their returns reduce. However, schools would be secure in knowing that non-teaching staff were now being treated in the same manner as teachers. I assume if this somewhat drastic approach were to be chosen there would have to be a new Scheme, since taking away current assets from the market would be unthinkable.

 

Recruiting Teachers for September 2018

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Next week UCAS opens the recruitment round for ITT courses starting in the autumn of 2017. So far the government seems to have kept those that watch the annual recruitment round in the dark as to the outcome of the Teacher Supply Model and the total number of places allocated to each route for next year. Perhaps the Select Committee can ask the Minister for the figures when he appears before them next Wednesday to talk about teacher supply. It is a slightly odd time for the Minister to appear before the Select Committee as the ITT census for 2016 has yet been published, so he presumably won’t know the final outcome of the number of places filled this autumn and how much better it was then last year?

He will, however, be able to talk about progress on the National Teacher Service in Yorkshire and Lancashire and how successful it has been. He may also be able to announce the date of the national roll-out and when the tendering process will start. If the Committee is really lucky, the Minister might announce what progress there has been on creating a national vacancy portal that was mentioned in the White Paper last March. In the light of the research by the TES, the Committee might also like to ask whether there is any difference in recruitment and retention of teachers and school leaders between grammar schools and secondary modern schools in those areas that still have fully selective systems of education.

If they haven’t already seen the new TV advert, the committee members can do so at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-recruitment-bulletin/teacher-recruitment-bulletin-5-october-2016 and might wish to compare the level of spending on the campaign with that of other government recruitment initiatives. As we know, teaching is by far one of the largest recruiters in the public sector. There has clearly been a stepping up of effort compared with a few years ago, but until the census appears, it isn’t possible to judge the success of last year’s efforts. It is interesting that the new advert seems to focus once again entirely on the secondary sector and doesn’t seem to feature any male teaching role model, always useful to help attract men into teaching as an under-represented group.

Hopefully, the Select Committee might also provide some indication of when it will conclude its inquiry into teacher supply. After all, it is more than six months since the NAO and the Public Accounts Committee considered the issue of teacher training. The Committee might explore how far the government has moved in the direction of meeting regional needs, rather than just the national demand and whether the government tracks in-year recruitment against training numbers. This is, of course, something TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk does on a daily basis and it has reported its findings to the Committee both in its original evidence and in the supplementary evidence submitted at the end of the summer term.

Finally, the Committee might ask the Minister what the DfE said to the Migration Advisory Committee on the issue of teacher shortages and the need for visas in light of current government policy about immigration and the use of workers already living in England?

 

 

 

 

The price of recruitment

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At first glance the stand-off between Unilever and Tesco about the price of yeast extracts, deodorants and ice-cream would seem to have little immediate relevance for education, except perhaps for the increasingly scarce resource of business studies teachers: a subject where the government’s Teacher Supply Model seems unable to generate enough places to satisfy demand from schools.

As we know, when there is a shortage of supply price goes up if there is unmet demand. Tesco seems to be calling Unilever’s bluff by assuming customers will opt for similar products either from the Tesco brand or from other labels. We shall see. I must confess to the fact that I was once what would today be called an intern at Unilever in the late 1960s working their Rotterdam HQ looking at the grocery market in Europe as hypermarkets and giant supermarkets were first emerging and the family store was coming under pressure.

So how does all this relate to the teacher supply market? We know there is a shortage of teachers. After all, there have been innumerable conferences, seminars and workshops on the topic over the past few years. The price of advertising a vacancy remains high. Indeed, it was one reason, along with better data collection, that TeachVac www.teachvac.couk was launched as a free job site for schools, teachers and trainees more than two years ago by a group of individuals including myself.

We are firmly of the belief that too much money is being spent on recruitment advertising and that the cash should be spent instead on teaching and learning. An increasing number of schools, especially secondary schools, are using TeachVac alongside other recruitment channels and as the momentum has built over the past two years so those with leverage on the price of recruitment in education should be working like Tesco to reduce the cost of recruitment to schools. Is that happening?

The White Paper in March talked of a government initiative in the recruitment field with a portal, but in TeachVac there is one up and running already at no cost to schools, teachers and trainees. It is interesting that no teacher association, nor the governors or business managers have ever asked TeachVac to participate in a discussion over the cost of recruitment advertising and how it can be reduced. Despite it being part of the traded services of many local authorities, they have shown more interest, even though in some cases they would lose income with a switch by their schools to TeachVac. Nevertheless, they still recognise their duty to the ‘common good’.

Teachvac is now fully funded for the 2017 recruitment round and also has a product in TeachSted www.teachsted.com for secondary schools facing an Osfted inspection where they will be asked about the local job scene for teachers.

As the grocery trade has shown, prices don’t always need to go up. We need to ensure best value in education and that includes in the recruitment market. Of course, I am not an independent observer, but so what. The aim must be better use of finite public resources.

 

Application apathy?

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I have a lot of time for Stewart McCoy, the operations director of Randstad Education, the global recruiter that is a player in the UK education recruitment market. As a result, I read Randstad’s latest survey and report with interest. Entitled, The Invisible Barrier: https://www.randstad.co.uk/employers/areas-of-expertise/education/the-invisible-barrier/ it raises some important issues.

The most important concern is the plethora of different application forms teachers can face when applying for jobs in different schools. It is possible for each and every academy to have a different form and certainly for different MATs and local authorities to use subtly different forms for applicants.

Of course, this is nothing new, when I first started teaching many local authorities still had space on the form for national service details and every form was different. Not very helpful to new entrants, but for many serving teachers changing jobs their service record was part of their employment history.

With the proper concerns these days about child welfare and the need for more rigorous vetting of applicants for posts working with children and young people it is understandable that application forms have become more complex and demanding of a person’s life history and less standardised. Randstad’s survey found 90% of the teachers that they surveyed wanted a ‘simple, universal application process’ and that the present system was off-putting and persuaded teachers to apply for fewer jobs at any one time.

Of course, there may also be other explanations of why teachers only apply for one job at a time. In some subjects, where demand outstrips supply, why make multiple applications if you might succeed with your first. After all, if you don’t, there will certainly be other jobs to apply for. Then there is also the effect of trainee and teacher workloads during the key March to March recruitment season for permanent vacancies. This problem does indeed point towards the need to simplify the application process with, at the very least, a common form for essential details. For every specific vacancy an applicant is always wise to tailor the free text part of the form to sell their unique characteristics that make them suitable for the school to hire to fill the advertised vacancy.

Of course, agencies can operate rather like the local authority ‘pool’ arrangements that used to be so common for primary school classroom teacher vacancies, where the overall suitability is measured through the initial application process and it is left to the interview stage for the real ‘sell’ by the candidate either selected by the school from the ‘pool’ or put forward as suitable by an agency. This avoids the need for tailoring the free text to the job being applied for, but can leave schools guessing about suitability of some candidates.

Incidentally, I was interested that Randstad conducted their survey in March, but have not published it until now. Their comment that September and October are two of the busiest months for teacher recruitment is an interesting one. There is always a small surge in vacancies in September, but Teachvac’s (www.teachvac.co.uk) evidence is that October is often a quieter month for permanent vacancies. Perhaps, this is the month that Randstad see their supply teacher work pick up as schools start to face their first staffing issues of the new school year.

The Randstad Report does contain some interesting issues for the DfE as they no doubt ponder the future of any possible national recruitment portal and the lessons they have learnt about the application process from the work to date on the National Teaching Service.

 

 

 

More or less

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A longer version of this blog post appeared first in the September/October edition of ‘Leader’, the ASCL magazine for school leaders.

Deciding how many new teachers to train each year is a tough job. Train too many and the Treasury wants to know why public money has been wasted; train too few and some schools won’t be able to recruit all the staff that they need. Officials also have to undertake the task several years ahead of time.

This summer, the government has been assessing how many teachers to train in the academic year 2017-18. These trainees will mostly enter the labour market in September 2018 with a small number needed for January 2019 vacancies.

Civil servants started this year’s exercise knowing that the school population was on the increase. They also knew more teachers were leaving the profession in recent years as the wider economy recovered from recession and also that public sector pay remained heavily regulated, especially with regard to annual increases.

Referendum effect

What they didn’t know was the outcome of the referendum on Europe and its possible consequences for the economy and on population movement, both inward and outward. As a result, even if the places allocated by the government are fully taken up by prospective trainees when trainee recruitment opens later in the autumn, the numbers may well still be wrong. Such is, too often, the fate of planners.

Because the teacher supply model essentially uses data that can be up to several years old, its outcomes ought to be subject to review by a group of knowledgeable individuals, including people from ASCL, who can question any obvious anomalies arising from the planning process. For the past two recruitment rounds, based on evidence collected through TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk, our free-to-schools vacancy matching service, we have queried the shortage of business studies places for trainees as well as the over-supply of training places for teachers of physical education trainees compared with recorded demand from schools across the country.

In both cases, the modelling process is correct, uses authentic and reliable data, but produces the wrong answer. Of course, you can still have the right answer, as in physics and design and technology, but not recruit enough trainees. That isn’t the fault of the planners, but of another group of civil servants.

While planners might not have been able to foresee the result of the referendum, they can model the effects of the introduction of any national funding formula on the demand for teachers. However, to do so might indicate, ahead of any consultation, the thinking of government. This relationship between policy change and future consequences on the ground goes a long way to explain why, for so many years, the teacher supply model wasn’t shared with anyone outside of government.

Unexpected vacancies?

Putting aside all of this background, schools and head teachers really want to know where they are if faced with unexpected vacancies for January 2017. After all, there are no more trainees entering the labour market until next summer and the recent School Teachers’ Review Body report identified new entrants as taking 55% of main scale vacancies, up from 50% a few years ago.

At TeachVac, we track the number of trainees, as recorded by the government’s annual ITT census against recorded vacancies. We discount those trainees on Teach First, now included in the census, and those on the School Direct salaried route as these two groups are likely to be employed either in the school where they train or another local school if they prove to be suitable entrants into the profession. We also take off a percentage for those unlikely to complete their teacher preparation programme, for whatever reason. Schools that use TeachVac to register vacancies receive an update on the current position in the subject where they have a vacancy when they post that job on TeachVac.

The original article then discusses the position in the summer of 2016 as reported using TeachVac data- That section of the article has been omitted here as it is now out of date.

The picture for 2017

Finally, a brief first look at the recruitment situation for 2017. At the time of writing, recruitment to courses is still in progress. However, based on past experiences, we believe that there will be insufficient trainees in subjects such as physics, design and technology, maths, business studies and IT entering training, unless there is a last minute rush.

A survey of School Direct salaried courses shown as having vacancies on the UCAS web site at the end of July revealed more than 600 listed vacancies, although some may have been duplicates advertised under more than one heading. Nevertheless, there were only two vacancies in the North East, compared with more than 100 in London schools. This reinforces concerns for the labour market in London.

Although schools may have found the 2016 recruitment round easier in some aspects than the 2015 recruitment round turned out to be, the staffing challenge facing schools is not yet over and much uncertainty surrounds the 2017 recruitment round that starts in January.

TeachVac will continue to monitor the situation and offer schools a free platform to place vacancies at no cost to themselves, teachers or trainees.

Note: http://www.teachsted.com now offers a service to schools facing an ofsted inspection and offers a tailored report on the local job market for secondary schools

 

Issues around collecting vacancy data

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Today was the day that submissions had to have been sent to the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) in connection with their partial review of shortage subjects in education. In preparing the TeachVac submission www.teachvac.co.uk we confronted several methodological issues.

In the first instance, there is the issue of collecting continuous data versus collecting data at a single point in time. TeachVac collects new data every weekday, whereas the DfE collects vacancies only in terms of the number of vacancies recorded at the date of the School Workforce Census in November. So long as there is data for several years that method provides information about trends at that point in time, but cannot say anything about what happens during the rest of the year. The DfE can also calculate turnover and that is also important as additional evidence, but not as compelling as it might seem at first sight. Turnover records outcomes and not desires, so if a school advertises for a teacher of physics, but appoints a biologist because no physicist applies, the data has recorded the turnover, but not the fact that it wasn’t an ideal match with the original requirement of the school.

Some other organisations that collect data on teacher vacancies appear to reply upon vacancies advertised on job boards. Even if job boards are studied regularly, the fact that many vacancies aren’t linked to a particular school makes identifying a reliable total more of a challenge. Is this maths vacancy advertised today for a teacher in London the same as the one advertised yesterday or was that filled and another London schools has requested a teacher? Indeed, could there be several vacancies for maths teachers in London hidden behind a single advertisement? This is more doubtful, because presumably job boards want to show they handle a large number of vacancies for many different schools. Hopefully, there are no occurrences of ‘ghost’ vacancies advertised on job boards just to attract applicants to the site.

As TeachVac is now collecting additional data on several man scale vacancies, it is also able to more successfully handle the issue of identifying multiple vacancies advertised at the same time in the same subject. This is quite common in new schools advertising for staff for the first time, and not unusual in subjects such as English and mathematics during the height of the recruitment season during April.

There still remains the issue of re-advertisements that bedevils all those that study vacancies. The only perfect solution is to ensure a vacancy is attached to a unique identification number that follows it until the post is filled. Until then, there must be an element of extrapolation in any statistics that analyse the job market. There is a similar issue with repeat advertisements, especially in print media, but this is essentially the same problem discussed above with jobs that appear on digital job board. TeachVac has a mechanism for coping with this issue as part of its AI routines.

The MAC will no doubt be wise to these issues when it considers the submissions it has received. It will also have to consider why in the past business studies and design and technology weren’t considered as shortage subjects. Finally, there is the issue, advanced by some in the maths world that schools are supressing vacancies because they don’t want to alarm parents.  To measure that you need to look at the DfE’s analysis of teacher numbers and the highest level of qualifications of those teaching a subject and how those have changed over time.

TeachVac has now extended its AI to start collect vacancies beyond teaching and it is discovering some of the issues recorded here makes data collection in that sector possibly even more of a challenge.