Category Archives: schools

Cut recruitment costs

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TeachVac is currently receiving a number of calls from schools that are finding either very few or no responses to their adverts for teaching posts. This is not a surprise to me because this blog has been predicting a very challenging recruitment round in 2023 ever since the DfE published its ITT census in December of 2022.

However, I imagine it must be galling to a school leadership team to have handed over thousands of pounds for recruitment advertising and not to have received a single response to an advert. TeachVac was founded on the principle that modern technology could reduce prices dramatically. Up until this year, schools have often ignored the cost of advertising on the grounds that their recruiter delivered results. Not anymore.

TeachVac has been offering secondary schools a three-month deal of £125 for unlimited vacancies during the three months that covered the key recruitment season. This offer is still available at www.teachvac.co.uk

For schools thinking about their recruitment budget for the next school year starting in September,  TeachVac will offer secondary schools the same package as this year; £500 for unlimited matches for all teaching jobs advertised during the year.

As an incentive, secondary schools signing up in June will only pay £400 if they pay on sign-up or £500 if invoiced in August. Primary schools continue to pay £75 for the year. Groups of schools can benefit from further discounts depending upon the volume of vacancies and the number of schools in the grouping.

Currently, TeachVac also has rates for agencies and other non-school advertisers wanting to match their teaching jobs with TeachVac’s database of jobseekers. Rates start from as low as £3 per vacancy registered, with users identifying the specific local authority area where the school with the vacancy is located and £10 for matches across a government region such as London or the South East. Matches are made for 21 days or until the closing date for the vacancy.

TeachVac’s database of registered users is growing by the day. As a ‘closed’ system users need to register to be matched with vacancies as they are posted. This means that TeachVac has an accurate count of registered users. The basic service remains free to teachers seeking a job.

TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk invites schools to discuss any specific needs beyond the basic service offered, including the wider placement of vacancies on social media, and advertorials about the benefits of working in the school.

TeachVac has a wealth of information on the job market, and can produce reports tailored to the needs of MATs; local authorities; dioceses or others interested in the working of the labour market.

Unlike the DfE site, TeachVac’s closed system does not muddle up non-teaching and teaching posts and also offers teachers the chance to see job opportunities across both state and private sector schools in one place.

TeachVac is backed by eight years of operation and staff with 40 years of knowledge of the labour market for teachers. It is also UK owned.

Four-day week for teachers?

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A Labour MP has called for a four-day working week to be introduced across the public sector.

Lib Dem-run South Cambridgeshire District Council’s cabinet will meet today to approve the continuation of the trial for all desk-based staff as well as extending it to cover caretakers and binmen. 

These are just two of the headlines from an article that I read this morning. What would be the implications for teachers of the introduction of a four-day week? The answer depends upon whether the same amount of face-to-face contact with pupils was maintained as at present and whether that was contact time spread over four or five days? What effect would four longer school days have on pupils, especially younger pupils? After all, some early years settings already offer wrap around care that is much longer than the traditional school-day.

What would the psychologists and those that study brain development in children have to say about putting five days of work into four? Perhaps a model would develop of four days of taught time and the fifth for ‘homework’ or supplementary activities.

On the plus side, parents also working a four-day week would have an extra day with their children: on the downside, parents whose working week did not coincide with the school four-day week would have to deal with the need for extra childcare.

Any change would come with a cost both to individuals and to the State. If there wasn’t sufficient funding, schools might be tempted to cram the teaching into four days and use the fifth day to generate income from their school sites and playing fields.

In a sector struggling to recruit enough teachers at present, would a four-day week make the profession more or less attractive to potential teachers. Certainly, if the bulk of graduate careers moved to a four-day week, teaching, already operating an employer-driven form of flexi-time, might be unattractive without some other boost to conditions of work.

A four-day working week might be a real challenge to the private school sector, where the additional costs would most likely have to be passed on to parents through increased fees. An increase of this magnitude might drive more parents back into the state sector, upping the cost of state education to the government. Add VAT on to the costs, and such numbers switching might increase still further.

During the Corbyn era, Labour proposed four additional bank holidays for workers; all during school holidays, so teachers would have seen no benefit from them. The implications for the teaching profession and others working in schools of the widespread introduction of a four-day working week do need to be considered.

However, I don’t think that the present model of schooling will continue as it has for the past 150 years. The AI revolution may well turn out to be as profound for society as the microchip revolution that started in the 1970s and transformed the world of work beyond recognition in many areas, but only to a limited degree in schools.

 Technology and its interaction with the process of schooling has further to go in the future. Perhaps the pressure for a four-day working week for humans might be the catalyst for major changes in schooling?

Silly Numbers

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The last time that I saw teacher recruitment in the state it is in 2023 was just over twenty years ago, at the start of the current century. Since TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk was established, some eight years ago, we have been keeping weekly records of the number of vacancies against the ‘free pool’ of possible new entrants from ITT courses not already working in a school. The methodology hasn’t changed, although it is the direction of travel rather than the actual numbers recorded each year that is really of relevance.

Now we are hallway through the main recruitment month for classroom teacher vacancies for September appointments, and with the coronation weekend out of the way, it is possible to make some assessment of the 2023 recruitment round. One factor that is new this year is the incidence of strike action, and the associated uncertainty of the outcome of the pay dispute.

However, the key message seems to be that while recorded vacancies continue to increase, when compared with the same week in 2022, the increase is not as great as witnessed last year. Indeed, much of the problem with recruitment may be down to the collapse in ITT numbers in some subjects rather than an absolute growth in vacancies.

Interestingly, business studies and design & technology, the two real shortage subjects, seem to have found a ‘floor’, and although still the worst subjects in terms of vacancy rates in relation to new ITT entrants, the situation is these two subjects is no worse than last year, and trending by the end of term to become slightly better than last year. Perhaps schools have given up the unequal struggle of trying to recruit such teachers.

Good luck to schools recruiting between now and January in all secondary subjects, because it will become an increasing challenge. Perhaps now is the time for some discussion about the most cost-effective, and also effective from an education perspective, means of sharing out our scarce teaching resource.

Although TeachVac benefits from the cash spent on recruitment, we spend part of the income identifying the parts of England where there is less interest in teaching posts, and supply is especially challenging if measured by interest in vacancies. There are certainly parts of England where despite the ITT reforms there are not enough ITT places to meet demand and where interest from outside the locality is limited, either because of high property prices or a lack of perception of the area as an interesting area in which to work.

The news this week from the Bank of England that the UK will avoid a recession isn’t good news for teaching. So long as salaries remain depressed; working conditions challenging and morale low, teaching will not attract the graduates it needs, especially if either the private sector is hiring graduates or individuals can take the risk of setting up their own businesses.

With the falling pupil numbers in primary schools, now may also be the time to look at offering primary trained teachers struggling to find teaching posts work with Key Stage 3 pupils. However, that would need some degree of organisation that the system still lacks. MATs with all-through schools may be able to identify how such teachers can be most effectively used. Perhaps there is room for a small-scale research project?

Is the job boom for teachers ending?

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After three months of record numbers of vacancies for teachers being recorded by TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk April saw something of a slowdown in the pace of advertised vacancies. No, there wasn’t an overall decline compared with the record set for April in 2022, but the rate of increase, as the table makes clear, was less then during the first three months of 2023. Nevertheless, the monthly total of 8,557 was a new record for the period since 2018, the year when TeachVac first started analysing monthly trends in vacancies.

201820192020202120222023
January358248186497207962697807
February301041746318389646289056
March42156185681160391051612289
April477760224432511084618557
May632778454375674114211
June22233296188627955968
July6129085807051812
August377390287315794
September17722718195629604711
October25693745223231315106
November23052897197733925063
December13822090121421773112
Source: TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk

There may have been special factors restricting the number of vacancies in April this year. The holiday period always has an effect on the April vacancy numbers and this year there may have been an effect due to the industrial action affecting many schools.

The interesting question is what will vacancies be like during May in 2023? Traditionally, May is the peak month for classroom teacher vacancies in the secondary sector. It is too early to predict what will happen in 2023, and the effect of the coronation and the extra bank holidays in addition to the hardening of the industrial unrest in the profession might affect the profile of vacancies this month.

Nevertheless, schools do need to be fully staffed for September, and there are fewer new entrants than in recent years, as this blog has pointed out in recent posts. Should serving teachers decide to quit, in greater numbers than last year, for whatever reason, then vacancies will remain buoyant. But, should the effect of the cost-of-living crisis and increased rents and mortgages in particular deter teachers from leaving, especially if they think that in doing so, they might miss any one-off payment for back pay, then perhaps the 14,000 recorded vacancies of May 2023 might not be bettered this year.

Within the overall national picture there are examples to be found of both significant increases such as for IT teachers in London, although that was balanced by a decrease in demand for such teachers from schools across the South East. Maths teachers were in demand in the North Wet, but not in the North East during April, and Science teachers were wanted in the Yorkshire and The Humber region, but less so in the West midlands than in April 2022.

Demand for primary classroom teachers was weak in April. Leaving aside the special circumstances of April 2020, the recorded vacancies were the lowest seen since before 2018 across England as a whole, with demand across the South East being especially weak this April.

Anyone interested in more granular data by local authority or other filter is welcome to ask for a special report from TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk Prices are reasonable and include a breakdown by state and private schools as well as by academies and maintained schools.

The reality of the teacher recruitment crisis

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Thanks to the DfE reopening the data files on teacher numbers and the calculations behind the need for increased targets it is now possible to ask some more interesting questions about teacher supply.

Two key ones are: what percentage of new entrants should we expect to enter the Further Education Sector and what percentage should we expect to take teaching posts in private schools and tutoring establishments? The DfE should have access to this data from the profiles of ITT providers.

However, there is some sector-wide evidence in the data associated with the Teacher Supply Model in the tables of the percentage completing ITT and percentage employed in state schools that can go some way to addressing these questions.

SubjectCompletion %Entering Employment %2022 offers2022 ITT Census minus TFCensus as % OffersEntering Employment Based 2022 on census
Primary9168 10,582  
 Mathematics897020481,67982%1175
 Biology907368456683%413
 Chemistry897284970383%506
 Physics846453240376%258
 Computing896241932979%204
 English927616461,44788%1100
 Classics9759645891%34
 Modern Languages936280865781%407
 Geography926861657293%389
 History93711144103290%733
 Art & Design936656547885%315
 Business Studies926324218677%117
 Design & Technology937444442896%317
 Drama946738432986%220
 Music916628725890%170
 Others946548442688%277
 Physical Education97631543140591%885
 Religious Education927234029386%211
 Secondary total   12,356 7733
Source: DfE and TeachVac

Completion rates used by the DfE vary from just 84% in the already small cohort of physics trainees to 97% in both Classics and physical education. Percentages entering employment range from 74% of design and technology trainees to 59% of classics trainees and 62% of computing trainees. Physics, with an employment rate of 64%, has a percentage that is little better than computing.

In calculating the number of trainees in the 2022 ITT Census – minus Teach First trainees, as they are already in the classroom – I have assumed the same base level as a starting point as for completion rates as for employment rates. If the percentage entering employment were of the percentage completing, the totals for the latter would be lower.

So, where are the missing 145 physics trainees? Undoubtedly, the largest number are teaching in the private sector; some will be lecturing in Sixth Form of other Further Education colleges and some won’t have entered teaching at all. A few might have decided to work in schools outside of England.

I suspect that the influence of the private sector on these numbers is best seen in the data around classics. The Census recorded 58 trainees, with just 59% entering employment in the state sector. That’s just 34 teachers. With the target for 2023/24 cut to 25, if ITT providers stuck to the target and didn’t over-recruit, it is entirely possible that there would be no Classics trainees available for the state school sector for September 2024.

Now, many may not weep about the loss of classics as a subject, although a cogent case can be made for its retention by those that support it. Fortunately, in history and physical education, where targets have been reduced, low employment percentages may owe more to the over-recruitment against the previous targets than a warning of teacher shortages. However, the contribution of these teachers to the staffing of other subjects may cause other problems for the staff creating timetables for schools in September 2024.

Collateral damage to religious education, where the employment rate of 72% produce a total of only 293 new entrants, is one obvious likely outcome if history numbers are restricted to anywhere close to the 2023 target.

As these numbers haven’t been adjusted for either apprenticeships or the School Direct Salaried scheme, they may well still be slightly too high to represent reality in terms of the ‘open’ labour market.

How they are spread out across the country, is a whole different set of issues that perhaps the Select committee might like to delve into as part of its discussions with the Secretary of State.

High Achievers and ITT outcomes for 2023

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In my previous post I mentioned that I didn’t know whether or not the High Achiever programme numbers were included in the ITT overall targets. By delving into the methodology section, it seems that they are.

As Teach First has had a good record of meeting its targets, I have reworked the data for April offers to add in the assumption that all High Achiever places will be filled.

Subjectoffers April 23% of targetHigh Achievers % of Targetwith High Achievers
Art & Design30036%0%36%
Biology48746%11%58%
Business Studies14212%3%15%
Chemistry46139%6%45%
Classics48192%0%192%
Computing23220%4%24%
Design & Technology30114%2%16%
Drama19665%0%65%
English127342%11%53%
Geography52035%5%40%
History63980%8%87%
Mathematics119941%9%50%
Modern Languages70324%5%29%
Music15620%4%24%
Others28012%0%12%
Physical Education1249170%0%170%
Physics36113%3%16%
Religious Education17927%5%32%
Total872633%5%39%
Source: TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk

The final column shows my assumption about the percentage of places that are currently filled based on current offers plus all High Achiever places. On this basis, assuming all of those offered a place turn up at the start of the course, and offers continue to be made at the same rate as in previous years, targets won’t be met, but there might be a slight improvement over last year.

The qualifications around the difference between ‘offers’, some of which are conditional, and outcomes, means these figures are only indicative. I will try and find time to compare the final offer total from last September with the ITT census number as that will provide an indication of ‘drop-out and no shows that could be factored into the totals.

However, it is possible to say with almost 100% certainty that targets won’t be met in many secondary subjects again this year even if target numbers hadn’t been increased.

With the addition of graduating students from degree programmes, it is likely that primary output will be more than sufficient to meet the needs of the sector. Whether these new entrants will be where they are required is another matter.

Bit late for ITT targets

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The DfE has finally published the ITT targets for courses starting this autumn. Postgraduate initial teacher training targets: 2023 to 2024 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)  In addition, they have also supplied details of the Teacher Supply Model that allows the workings behind the calculation of the targets to be discussed. This is a welcome return to open government after a few years of limited information on the thinking behind the numbers.

Two points arise from the announcement. Firstly, it is incredibly late in the recruitment round. For most subjects that fact won’t matter because the targets aren’t going to be met. But what will happen in Classics and physical education where there are currently more offers than places in the target? Will potential trainees have their offers withdrawn? Will providers recruit over target, and will there be any consequences for doing so? Will the DfE look at overall recruitment by a provider rather than on a subject-by-subject basis?

The DfE’s decision may well influence how providers approach the business of making offers in future rounds. Historically, these targets were issued in the autumn so that providers knew their allocations before they had started to make many offers. Such an approach is much more sensible than announcing the target after Easter, more than half-way through the recruitment cycle. In the past, there were also indicative targets for future years. This helped providers manage their workforce planning.

The more alarming feature of these targets is the addition of the under-recruitment from earlier rounds. I have addressed this issue before. Schools do not start each new year sending children home because they couldn’t recruit enough teachers. They botch, by recruiting those teachers that they can, and adjusting the timetable and the underlying curriculum to fit the staff they have recruited. There are as a result not the vacancies there were in the training cycle.

Suppose there was an unexpected economic slowdown because of US bank failures and teaching suddenly recruited to these new targets? Would these additional trainees find jobs in 2024. The answer is we don’t know because the demands on school funding, especially for staff costs are not yet known, but it would seem unlikely. So, if a school has employed a biologist to teach physics and were offered a physics teacher for 2024 would they sack the biology teacher? Or let the physics teacher wait for an opening to arise?

Adding unfilled places to future targets has been tried in the past, and didn’t work. I am surprised to see it being used again this year.

As a result of the increase in targets in many secondary subjects – and it isn’t clear whether these targets include Teach First numbers or not – the April offer numbers represent only a small fraction of the DfE’s target number in many subjects, as the data in the table reveals.

SubjectOffers as a % of target
Business Studies12
Others12
Physics13
Design & Technology14
Computing20
Music20
Modern Languages24
Religious Education27
Total33
Geography35
Art & Design36
Chemistry39
Mathematics41
English42
Biology46
Drama65
History80
Physical Education170
Classics192
Source: TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk

History and drama may well meet their targets, but all other subjects probably won’t. Will the DfE add any shortfall on these targets onto those for next year, making the totals even higher and harder to achieve?

Finally, how will these target numbers play out with the newly accredited providers? Are the institutions going to take the extra numbers or might the loss of some providers be a matter for regret?

Warning signs on ITT recruitment

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The DfE is holding a webinar for teachers looking for a job this afternoon. I suspect that it may well be full or primary teachers and trainees, plus some history and PE teachers. Anyone else still looking for a teaching post for September either has only just started or may need more than a webinar to help them find a job. TeachVac www.teachvac.couk along with other services does offer one to one advice sessions.

However, based upon the applications data for 2023 postgraduate courses released today, the DfE might be better advised chasing up more applicants for next year. April can be a tricky month to assess the status of the applications round for any year because of Easter and other faith festivals. However, some trends are becoming clear.

The increase in applications, as reported previously, is being driven by an increase from those recorded as from the ‘rest of the world’. Thus, of the 2,601 recorded increase in applicants compared with April last year, some 2,014 are shown as from ‘rest of the world’.

The danger is that this increase is masking some worrying trends. The number of applicants under the age of 25 continues to be below the number recorded last year by around 400 applicants, or more than 2%.

More concerning are the nine secondary subjects where offers are at their worst level since before 2016/17. Of the other secondary subjects, most are still below the offers at April in the 2020/21 cycle. Only geography and design and technology are back to offer levels in earlier years. For geography it is the best April since 2018/19, and for design and technology, the best since 2016/17, although even at the current level the target won’t be met for this year.

The sciences and modern foreign languages are the subjects where the greatest improvements in offers can be identified. So, perhaps the bursary and scholarships are making a difference. However, there is not the data to see the extent to which these extra offers are being made to ‘home students’ or those from overseas.

The increase in applicants is significantly affecting universities, faced with nearly 8,000 more applications so far this round: a 20% increase in workload. The total number of applicants rejected has increased from 3,727 in April last year to 5,612 this April. Nearly 300 more applicants have also withdrawn their applications.

Another worrying sign is the decline in applicants domiciled in London and the South East regions where demand for teachers is always the highest.

Unless there is an increase in home applicants over the next couple of months this round is beginning to look as if the outcome will be grim for providers trying to fund courses with limited numbers of students, and for schools seeking teachers in September 2024 and January 2025.

Hopefully, the resolution, when it comes, of the pay and conditions dispute between the teaching associations and the government will include provisions to encourage more graduates to choose teaching as a career. Paying their fees might be a useful concession.

Why do some schools suspend more pupils than other schools?

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The levelling up debate seems to have somewhat been overshadowed recently by the concerns about Ofsted, and the issues with worker’s pay and conditions. However, the problem of how to increase success rates for some schools hasn’t disappeared.

As I have written before on this blog, the lack of any local ability to intervene in the absence of government funding stream for levelling up, means that improvements are often haphazard, if they even happen at all. Academy chains could shunt pupils out of their schools, and leave others to cope, and failing schools have limited support outside of opportunity Areas or other places with special funding.

For a long period of time, part of Oxford city – that city of dreaming spires – has been divided into two; the generally, affluenct and successful North and West of the city, and less well-off south and east, as the ONS data from the 2021 starkly reveals. Not so much a case of the wrong side of the tracks, but the wrong side of the river Cherwell – not, note, the river Thames.

As a result, it is perhaps not much of a surprise to find that two of the state-funded secondary schools within the city – both located in the south of the city – have places in the top 200 secondary schools by the rate of suspensions during the Spring term of 2021/22 school-year. Fortunately, neither is in the top 100 schools, and for both they are probably faring better than they were a few years ago.

This an issue that the government’s Social Mobility Commission Social Mobility Commission Quarterly Commentary: March 2023 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) might wish to explore in some detail.

Five of the 20 local authorities with the most schools in the top 200 secondary schools are authorities with selective secondary schools. One is a south coast unitary with a disproportionately large number of its non-selective schools in the list of the top 200 schools. Like Oxfordshire, it is an authority unlikely to attract extra funding for its schools under levelling-up, but there must be an issue to explore as to why so many of its schools are in this list?

A few years ago, University Technical Colleges used to feature strongly in this type of list, but closures and presumably some better understanding of transfer at fourteen has reduced their number to four, two of them being the only schools in their authority in the list.

The extent to which feeder primary schools for these 200 schools also feature in the list would be an interesting exercise to undertake. Also, it might be interesting to ask why one county has only one school in the list, whereas an adjacent unitary has three schools?

There is something of a north-south divide in the list and relatively few schools in London are in the list: an interesting turnaround from the last century, when I am sure that there would have been more of the capital’s secondary schools in the list. No doubt, the strength of some of the academy chains located in the capital has made a difference.

Filling a vacancy for a teacher of physics

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Last July I wrote a post about how many teachers of physics might start work in state schools in September 2022. As that post still receives views, I thought that I would update my projection for September 2023, based upon the DfE’s ITT Census of last autumn.

The ITT Census revealed that there were 444 trainee physics teachers studying on all routes on course and programmes that commenced in the autumn of 2022. Some 59 of these are on salaried schemes. That was less than one fifth of the DfE’s target number required to staff our school system.

41 on the High Achievers programme – presumably mostly Teach First

  4 on Postgraduate Apprenticeships

14 on the School Direct Salaried programme

That means there were 385 trainees on other routes into teaching, with 300 of those divided between higher education providers and SCITTs. The remainder being on the School Direct fee route.

Allowing for a non-entry rate of 5%, as a result of either not completing the course; entering teaching in an independent school or the further education sector such as in a Sixth Form College, this leaves a possible 350 physics trainees job hunting in 2023. If the non-entry to maintained schools increased to 10% of the cohort, and physics has had lower entry rates in the past than some subjects, the job seeker numbers would be reduced to 315 in total.

Up until the 18th April from 1st January 2023, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has recorded 668 specific advertisements for teachers of physics. I am sure that there will also be some other schools that have together posted the 5,384 science teacher vacancies that were really seeking a physics teacher.

This suggests that trainees will be scarce on the ground. Of course, trainees are not the only source of teachers to fill vacancies. There are returners and those switching between schools. Assuming these groups total the same as the trainee number, with the 5% reduction, this might make a total of 700 job seekers for the 668 distinct physics vacancies already advertised and the share of other vacancies where physics was a key component of the job description.

It seems likely that any school seeking a teacher of physics that attracts no interest via a job board such as TeachVac might well need to consider the worth of spending cash on using a recruitment agency. A no find: no fee approach would be the best for a school, but challenging for agencies. However, agencies can also look abroad to see whether there might be teachers overseas willing to fill the school’s vacancy. However, I would think it sensible for a school to ask for proof of success rates before engaging any high- cost agency to fill their teaching vacancy.

If filling vacancies for September will be a challenge, finding a replacement for a January 2024 vacancy for a teacher of physics might well be nigh on impossible for the vast majority of schools. Hopefully, not many schools will be faced with that situation.