Category Archives: technology

TeachVac updates website with vacancy counter

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Teachers can now see at a glance how many vacancies TeachVac has each day. www.teachvac.co.uk The site displays an overall total and the number of vacancies in some key subject areas and the primary sector. Of course, as it is August, vacancy numbers are low, so there is also the total for the year to date.

TeachVac is geared to the needs of teachers. As a result, it only carries teaching jobs. The DfE vacancy site, for instance, has both teaching and non-teaching vacancies. Earlier this week 146 of the 262 vacancies listed on the DfE vacancy site weren’t teaching jobs. Many were for Teaching Assistants, but there were also a plethora of other types of job. There were 110 teaching jobs plus six duplicated jobs. So, less than half the vacancies were for teaching posts. By comparison, TeachVac had 507 live teaching jobs listed by schools across England on the same day

Teachers want a site where they can receive the widest possible range of teaching posts that meet their needs both in terms of location and sills. I am proud of the achievements of TeachVac during the years since it was set up to demonstrate a new way of linking teachers with the jobs they were seeking, whether as a newly qualified teacher; an existing teacher changing schools or seeking promotion of someone wanting to return to teaching.

TeachVac is recording record monthly visits and ‘hits’ on the website as the message spreads among teachers and schools. At this time of year, schools are looking to renew existing deals with other listing services. They should ask whether the price represents good value for money.

TeachVac has also enabled me, as its Chair, to produce blogs using the data, such as the recent posting about whether there are fewer jobs or just fewer re-advertisements? As that post mentioned, a unique job reference number would provide much better data about the functioning of the labour market for teachers. I have campaigned, so far without any success on that issue as with the issue of making the term ‘teacher’ a reserved occupation that can only be used by those with Qualified Teacher Status.

If you haven’t tried TeachVac yet, then please do so. The team on the Isle of Wight would love to have your feedback.

Demand for teachers

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How is demand for teachers shaping up so far in 2021 now that schools are returning to what might be described as the new ‘post-modern’ normal?

An examination of weekly vacancies this year compared with the past three years data conducted by TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk has concluded that demand remains weak for teachers of:

Physical Education

History

Geography

Art

Mathematics

English

And Science overall, although demand for some specific subjects remains stronger.

Compared with pre-pandemic levels.

Over the past few weeks, demand has been strengthening for teachers of music (after a weak start to the year) and teachers of languages.

Demand remains strong for teachers of:

Religious Education

Business Studies

IT/Computing

Demand for teachers of Design and Technology is at record levels.

Some of the weakness in demand in Mathematics may be attributable to a better level of supply requiring fewer re-advertisements. Conversely, some of the increased demand for Design and Technology teachers may be due to increased levels of re-advertisements as schools struggle to find suitable candidates.

In terms of the location of vacancies, the South East region has witnessed the greatest demand from schools so far in 2021 whereas the North East region is still the part of England where jobs are hardest to find.

Vacancies are now reducing across all categories, as the summer holidays approach. The likely overall number of vacancies for 2021 is going to be somewhere between 55,000 to 60,000 as recorded vacancies by TeachVac. Up on last year, but unlikely to match the record level seen in 2019, when demand outpaced supply in many subjects across the year as a whole.

With reports that the independent sector has recorded a decline in pupil numbers, presumably due to a reduction in overseas students, any recovery in that sector will likely increase demand for teachers in 2022.

Are schools wasting £30 million pounds of public money?

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TES Global, the largest supplier of paid-for teacher recruitment advertising in the field of education has just published their accounts for the year ending 31st August 2020. Those so far published are for TES Global Limited. Those for TES topco are yet to appear. The published accounts can be found on the Companies House page, by searching under TES Global.

The accounts for the year to 31st August 2020 included almost six months of the pandemic, so it is not surprising that turnover from continuing operations fell by around £2 million to £59.2 million. Thanks to interest receivable and other income of £25.3 million, the Group made an overall profit of £22.3 million. Without that income there would have been a loss of around £3 million; this despite cutting the wages and salary bill from just under £14 million to around £9.5 million, and slashing headcount from 235 to 191.

The sale of the TES owned Teacher Supply Business in December 2020, for a total consideration of £27 million including upfront cash of £12.5 million, will no doubt further help to strengthen the balance sheet. However, the income from those businesses were, presumably, included in these accounts.

Of interest to me, as Chair of TeachVac, and no doubt civil servants at the DfE running the DfE teacher vacancy site, was how the TES was doing serving the teacher recruitment market, and how much cash was it securing from state-funded schools for recruitment advertising, all of which is now on-line, like both TeachVac and the DfE sites.

As the TES has been pursuing a policy of persuading schools to pay an annual subscription for several years now, rather than point of sale advertising, the TES Group income has been less affected by the downturn in vacancies during the pandemic than it would have been if each advert had been paid for individually. A quick calculation from the published accounts suggests that while overall revenue fell by 4%, advertising revenue continued to benefit from the switch to subscriptions. Such income rose from £37.6 million the previous year to £42.4 million in 2019-2020. Traditional advertising income fell from £17.7 million to £10.9 million during the same period.

The TES has some 1,000 international schools and presumably schools elsewhere in the United Kingdom, as well as non- state-funded schools that contributed to the £42.4 million of revenue. A generous estimate might suggest perhaps £35 million was paid by state-funded schools in England in subscription income in 2019-2020 to the TES.

It is interesting to compare this with the DfE evidence to the STRB earlier this year, where at paragraph 45 they stated that:

With schools spending in the region of £75m on recruitment advertising and not always filling vacancies, there are very significant gains to be made in this area. Over 75% of schools in England 14 are now signed up to use the service and over half a million jobseekers visited Teaching Vacancies in 2020. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/967761/STRB_Written_Evidence_2021.pdf

According to the latest DfE announcement, some 78% of schools have now signed up to the service https://www.publicsectorexecutive.com/articles/councils-encouraged-sign-dfes-free-teaching-vacancies-service?utm_source=Public%20Sector%20Executive&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12340062_Newsletter%2027%20Apr&dm_i=IJU,7CHNI,AUR327,TT9F6,1

I wonder where the other £30 million of so is going – surely not to the local press or eteach and The Guardian?

Either way, that is still a lot of cash schools are spending because they don’t have enough confidence in either TeachVac or the DfE sites to allow them to take the risk of not signing up to the TES. Or is it just inertia?

If the government is serious about helping schools save this money spent on recruitment advertising for other purposes, and the cash will surely be needed in the post-pandemic world, however speedy the recovery, given the amount of public cash spent in the past twelve months. There must be a campaign to encourage teachers to use the free sites, and for schools to always ask where applicants either received notice of the vacancy or saw the vacancy that they applied for. This will allow schools to evaluate the effect of paid-for advertising and the TES subscription compared with the use of the free sites instead.

Interestingly, TeachVac reached a new high of 6,000,000 hits in twelve months at the end of April. This was despite the fall in vacancies on the site during the past twelve months as schools cut the number of teaching post advertised.

May 2021 should be the first 1,000,000 hit month for TeachVac, with corresponding highs in visitors and vacancies matched as schools return to a more normal recruitment pattern, as explained in a previous post on this blog.

Teacher Shortages in 2022?

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The present satisfactory state of recruitment into teacher training looks likely to be short-lived if the messages from this month’s UCAS data are interpreted in a particular way. After almost 30 years of looking at either weekly or monthly data on applications and acceptances, one can start to discern trends and patterns. Covid threw a spanner in the works of what was an emerging teacher supply crisis. Has that spanner now been retrieved?

One the one hand, applicant numbers are still up on last year. The increase is just over 5,000 for those with a domicile in England, from 26,280 in April 2020 to 31,460 this April. Interestingly, there has been virtually no increase in applicants from the North East, but a large increase in applicants domiciled in the London region. This should be good news, as it is in London that there is a strong demand for teachers.

More worrying is the relative lack of interest from new graduates in teaching as a career. There are only around 700 more new young graduates 21 or under this year compared with the same time in 2020, whereas there are 1,300 more in the 25-29 age group. Career changers, perhaps furloughed or made redundant by the pandemic, seem more interested in teaching than young new graduates. Indeed, there are only 60 more male applicants in the youngest new graduate age group than this time last year. A trickle rather than a flood.

The most worrying number is the drop in applications for design and technology, from 970 in April last year to 880 this April. In April 2019 it was 950, so the decline must be of concern. Applications to train as a languages teachers are also weak when compared with previous years. However, the increase in applications to train as a mathematics teachers from 5,390 last April to 7,450 this year is good news, as ARK noted in their recent ITT bulletin.

The bizarre over-recruitment of both history and PE teachers continues, with 1,500 offers in PE and 1,230 in history. This compares with 380 offers in physics, 230 in design and technology and 330 in computing.

School Direct Salaried as a route continues to decline, whereas School Direct non-salaried continues to grow, if not to thrive. Higher Education has done well in attracting applications for primary courses, up from less than 14,000 to over 18,000 this year. The increase is slightly less for secondary phase courses. Apprenticeships have taken up some of the slack from the School Direct Salaried route, but offers in the secondary sector remain derisory at this point in the cycle.

So, there will be problems in 2022 recruiting design and technology teachers, physics teachers and probably business studies teachers as well, but a glut of history and PE teachers in most parts of England.  This blog will look at the likely outcomes in other subjects once the trends of the next couple of months become apparent. We don’t expect a big rush into teaching unless new graduates suddenly discover there are no jobs elsewhere and turn to teaching once their courses have finished and they finally have a degree.

What about Middle leaders? Is there a concern about recruitment?

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When there is a mis-match between the numbers of teachers required in certain subjects to meet the identified need by schools to staff a curriculum area various strategies are used to ensure that schools can deliver their timetables. One such strategy is using teachers with less than ideal subject knowledge until a better qualified teacher can be recruited.

However, if there is a shortfall in training, what are the consequences some years later for the recruitment of middle leaders in the subject? Design and Technology makes an interesting case study that I have used before. As a subject, it regularly fails to recruit sufficient trainees to meet the government’s target, especially since the demise of most of the undergraduate routes some years ago.

The UCAS data for the end of the 2020 cycle (discussed in an earlier post) provides data on the number of trainees recruited. (I could use the DfE’s ITT Census, but as this is not a subject that features much in Teach First numbers, the UCAS data covers most trainees).

Design & TechnologyRecruited into training*After 5% wastage
2014470447
2015530504
2016405385
2017300285
2018295280
2019400380
2020615584

*Source: UCAS end of cycle for trainee numbers

The table shows the changes in recruitment over the past seven years with the figure for an assumed 5% non-completion of the course.

So how many middle leaders might be required in this subject? Using the TeachVac database, it was possible to identify some 390 promoted posts in the subject advertised by schools across England in 2020. After removing those linked to specific parts of the subject, especially food technology, where the promoted post may be as much a recruitment incentive as a real middle leadership position, there were 300 posts for middle leaders in the subject. After allowing for re-advertisements, of which it can be estimated that there were about 60 during the year, this meant around 240 likely vacancies for middle leaders of design and technology.

How long does a teacher need before being ready for middle leadership? This is not an easy question to answer. For the sake of this exercise, let’s start by assuming 5 years. Thus the training cohort of 2014 might have been in the market for middle leadership positions in 2020. Assuming 450 entered teaching, (447 rounded up), and demand was 240, this would mean nearly two teachers from that cohort for each vacancy for a middle leader.

Now followers of the labour market for teachers will know that retention is an issue. After five years of service, perhaps a third of those entering teaching are no longer teaching in state schools. So, we need to discount the 450 by a third. The new total is 315 for 240 vacancies; a much less healthier pool from which to draw middle leaders.

Fortunately, 2014 was a relatively good year for recruitment into training. What will happen when the 2017 cohort reach five years of service in 2023? Assuming the same level of wastage, there might be only around 200 teachers left from that cohort. Hopefully, demand for middle leaders will be lower, but if it is similar to the estimate of 240-250 vacancies for 2020, then looking down the road a bit, some schools are going to have a real recruitment problem in the middle years of the decade.

Solutions include persuading more from earlier cohorts to take on middle leadership, even if they were previously reluctant to do so; accelerating the newer cohorts into leadership – not possible until the 2019 and 2020 cohorts come through; merging design and technology with say, art and design where supply of middle leaders is better, into larger faculties offering a better career prospect.

Different schools will adopt different tactics, and some may also offer better salaries than in the past through larger TLR payments.

So, should there be concerns about the supply of middle leaders? I think there ought at the very least, to be some discussion about the issue, and which schools might be most affected by any possible shortages?

DfE and Teacher Vacancies: Part Two

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The DfE is spending more money supporting their latest venture into the teacher recruitment market. Schoolsweek has uncovered the latest moves by the government to challenge existing players in this market https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-leans-on-mats-to-boost-teacher-job-vacancies-website-take-up/ in an exclusive report.

The current DfE foray into the recruitment market follows the failure of the Fast Track Scheme of two decades ago and the Schools Recruitment Service that fizzled out a decade ago. The present attempt also came on the heels of the fiasco around a scheme to offer jobs in challenging schools in the north of England that never progressed beyond the trial phase.

The present DfE site rolled out nationally two years ago this month. How successful it has been was the subject of a Schoolsweek article earlier this year. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfes-teacher-job-website-carries-only-half-of-available-positions/  This blog reviewed the market for vacancy sites for teachers last December, in a post entitled Teacher Vacancy Platforms: Pros and Cons that was posted on December 7, 2020.

In that December post, I looked at the three key sites for teacher vacancies in England. TeachVac; the DfE Vacancy site and The TES. As I pointed out, this was not an unbiased look, because I am Chair of the company that owns TeachVac. Indeed, I said, it might be regarded as an advertisement, and warned readers to treat it in that way.

There is an issue with how much schools spend on recruitment of teachers. After all, that was why TeachVac was established eight years ago. The DfE put the figure in their evidence to the STRB this year at around £75 million; a not insubstantial figure.

Will TeachVac be squeezed out in a war between the DfE backed by unlimited government funding and the TES with a big American backer? At the rate TeachVac is currently adding new users, I don’t think so. After all, the DfE site doesn’t cover independent schools, and in the present market I believe that most teachers want a site that allows access to all teaching jobs and not just some. That benefits both TeachVac and the TES as well as other players in the market, such as The Guardian and Schoolsweek, as well as recruitment agencies.

How much the DfE will need to spend on ensuring they cover the whole of the state-funded job market in terms of acquiring vacancies by the ‘school entering vacancies’ method is another interesting question? As is, how much will it also cost to drive teachers to using the DfE site and not TeachVac or the TES?

A view of TeachVac’s account reveals that Teachvac provides access to more jobs for teachers at less than the DfE is going to spend on promoting their site over the next few months. Such spending only makes good commercial sense if you want to remove a player from the market.

So here’s a solution. Hire TeachVac to promote the DfE site and use the data TeachVac already generates to monitor the working of the labour market. After all, that was also one of the suggestions from the Public Accounts Committee Report that spurred the DfE into action and the creation of their present attempt at running a vacancy site.

DfE and Teacher Vacancies: Part One

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In my previous post I discussed the issue of the DfE’s vacancy site and how by viewing it a page at a time resulted in duplication of some vacancies and the inability to see other vacancies. I asked the DfE to shed light on the problem by submitting a Freedom of Information request (FOI).

I have reproduced the DfE’s response below.  Essentially, the DfE site seems sound except for anyone undertaking the view of the site by the means that I selected. Since my purpose was to check how many non-teaching vacancies were listed on the DfE site, I had no other option but to use the method of viewing the site I selected.

Those using the sorting by closing date will discover another wrinkle, but I will leave you to do so if you are interested.

The DfE site has hit the headlines in a Schoolsweek exclusive https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-leans-on-mats-to-boost-teacher-job-vacancies-website-take-up/ TeachVac’s contribution to the story can be found at https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfes-teacher-job-website-carries-only-half-of-available-positions/

I will discuss the possible implications for the teacher recruitment market in my next blog. But, here is the DfE’s response to the FOI.

Thank you for your request for information, which was received on 15 March 2021 and assigned case number 2021-0017953. You requested the following information:


On the DfE vacancy site for teachers: https://teaching-vacancies.service.gov.uk/
1. How many of the published vacancies on 16th March or nearest available date with data were duplicated; and,
2. What was the number of unique vacancies on that day for teachers in institutions operating under schools regulations displayed on the DfE Vacancy site after excluding Sixth Form Colleges, other Further Education institutions and any private sector institutions and posts not requiring a teacher such as, but not exclusively, Teaching Assistant, cleaner, Examinations Officer and cover supervisor? Vacancies providing services across MATs and not linked to a specific school should also be excluded from the total provided.

I have dealt with your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“the Act”).


For context, the total number of live vacancies on Teaching Vacancies on 16 March was 1,386. As of 1 April, there are 2,330 live vacancies on Teaching Vacancies.

1. How many of the published vacancies on 16th March or nearest available date with data were duplicated?


For the purposes of this request, we have considered a ‘vacancy with data duplicated’ to be a vacancy with the same job title as another vacancy published by the same organisation which was also live on this date. The total number of vacancies meeting this definition on 16 March was 37 (2.7% of all live vacancies).

2. What was the number of unique vacancies on that day for teachers in institutions operating under schools regulations displayed on the DfE Vacancy site after excluding Sixth Form Colleges, other Further Education institutions and any private sector institutions and posts not requiring a teacher such as, but not exclusively, Teaching Assistant, cleaner, Examinations Officer and cover supervisor? Vacancies providing services across MATs and not linked to a specific school should also be excluded from the total provided.


Further Education institutions and private sector institutions are not permitted to list roles on Teaching Vacancies. Technical restrictions are in place to prevent this.


The total number of live vacancies on 16 March that were not at sixth form colleges, across a MAT or at multiple schools was 1,344 (97% of all live vacancies). Of these, the number of vacancies ‘requiring a teacher’ was 1,169 (87% of these live vacancies).


For the purposes of this request, we have defined ‘requiring a teacher’ as a listing with a job title containing the phrase ‘teacher’, ‘head’, ‘principal’ or ‘ordinat’ (as in coordinator or co-ordinator), but not containing any of the phrases ‘TA’ (in upper case only), assistant (but not in conjunction with ‘head’ or ‘principal’), ‘intervention’, ‘admin’, ‘account’, ‘marketing’, ‘admission’ or ‘care’. Structured data is not available on whether roles require a teacher, because the relevant fields are either optional for schools to complete or do not exist because they relate to vacancies that are not within the service’s Terms & Conditions. To obtain this information, vacancies have been filtered by relevant words and phrases. As a result, some teaching roles will have been excluded in counts of non-teaching roles and vice versa.

Data in: garbage out

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Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my post of the 15th March about the freedom of Information request that I have made to the DfE. The request was about to total of vacancies on their teacher vacancy site. New readers need to know that I am Chair of TeachVac, a similar site for teachers seeking permanent jobs in schools anywhere in England. Hence my interest in the topic.

When TeachVac staff checked the DfE site today, it was showing a total of 1,805 vacancies: a good score and about 45% of the vacancies numbers being displayed at that point on TeachVac. However, just over 600 of the DfE’s vacancies appeared to be duplicates. This would reduce their unique vacancy number to around 1,200, of which a proportion are non-teaching posts or posts in the further education sector not covered by TeachVac. Such a lower number would be less impressive for a site fully functioning for as long as the DfE site has been, and with unfettered access to free marketing to schools.

Interestingly, a vacancy for a school cleaner apparently appears multiple times on the DfE site when a user tried looks through the site to discover the composition of the 1,800 vacancies making up the total.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this approach in an open site, such as the DfE operates, but it does make comparison more of a challenge. I am still awaiting the DfE’s response to my FOI request – they have until after Easter before the reply period expires, and I would need to take the matter further.  Using the filters on the DfE site avoids the problem of duplication, but masks the issue of the total number of unique teacher vacancies being carried by the site.

This week has seen schools ramp up recruitment ahead of the Easter break, with an increasing number of vacancies being recorded in the primary sector. I shall be writing the April newsletter for TeachVac’s subscribers over the weekend, ready for publication at the start of the month. At this point, it still looks as if recorded teacher vacancies in the first quarter of 2021 will be below the number recorded in the same quarter of 2020. The big test will be vacancy levels in April and the first couple of weeks of May, especially now that schools are open and functioning as near to normal as possible in the present conditions.  

TeachVac has already predicted that there will be shortages in design and technology; business studies and computing this year, and mathematics is expected to be added to this list of subjects either just before or just after Easter.

On the other hand, physical education and history has far more trainees than vacancies and recruiting even more trainees in these subjects seems to reflect a government with little understanding of the cost of training teachers and the implications for trainees in these subjects. I am not one that advocated recruitment controls lightly, but thought should be paid to the consequences of training too many teachers for the state sector’s needs.

ITT: not all plain sailing

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Normally during a downturn in the economy, and the associated rise in unemployment, teaching does well as a career choice, and applications for places on graduate teacher preparation courses surge; they only peak when the labour market shows signs of picking up again.

The trend during the pandemic of the past year has been slightly different to this pattern. Yes, overall applications, and applicant numbers are up, as commentators that just look at the overall numbers have noted. However, for those more concerned with the details, the picture is more nuanced.

In primary, applications have not yet reached the peak seen in the 2016/17 round, and are some 5,000 or so below that level, and only 8,000 applications above the low point reached in March 2020 before the full extent of the current pandemic had become clear. There may be a warning here about the desirability of becoming a primary school teacher among the group that society has relied upon to ensure an intake of high quality new teachers each year. The public data doesn’t allow for any further comments, but someone should be taking a look at the detailed data.

It is in the secondary sector that the outcome is more nuanced. Three subjects stand out for concern. In biology, overall applications are down on March 2020, by around a thousand, to 2,360. While there will be plenty of chemistry trainees this year, with applications double what they were in March 2020, physics, as a subject, seems unlikely that it will meet its target for the year unless applications pick up in the second half of the year. As a result, any shortfall in biology may leave school struggling for science teachers for September 2022, if demand return to more normal levels next year.

In geography, applications are down by around 300 this year on last, meaning offer levels are not much above the low levels seen seven and eight years ago. However, with ever more history trainees competing for jobs, schools will be able to replace geography teachers with humanities teachers. Whether their quality of subject knowledge will be acceptable is an issue for others to debate.

Design and technology, the ‘ugly duckling’ and neglected child of the school curriculum is a real and serious concern. Applications by mid-March were just 760, compared with 820 at the same point in 2020. That’s application and not applicants. As a result, offer levels are at their lowest point for March for any year in the last decade.

I would content that design and technology is an important subject, and the DfE needs to address where the future stock of teachers is to come from? An urgent look at the details of applicants and why only 190 offers have been made is needed. In reality, this could be a few as 100 actual applicants offered places on design and technology ITT courses by mid-March.

Nearly half of the growth in applicants can be found in the London and South East regions. Whether this means that some rebalancing of ITT places might be required, as these are the two regions with the greatest demand for teachers, is no doubt a matter for active discussion. It would be foolhardy to leave places unfilled in other parts of the country whilst turning away acceptable applicants from London, especially as London often produces a higher percentage of BAME trainees than other parts of England.

Next month the blog will consider the different routes into teaching, and how they are faring and also revisit the issue of the age profile of applicants.

Freedom of Information Request

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The DfE’s teaching vacancies web site has been in operation for some time now. Indeed, in the DfE’s evidence to the School Teachers Review Body (STRB) this year they state the following at paragraph 45:

We are also continuing to develop and improve our Teaching Vacancies service, which is a free, national jobs listing website designed to save schools money and deliver high quality candidates. With schools spending in the region of £75m on recruitment advertising and not always filling vacancies, there are very significant gains to be made in this area. Over 75% of schools in England 14 are now signed up to use the service and over half a million jobseekers visited Teaching Vacancies in 2020 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/967761/STRB_Written_Evidence_2021.pdf

On the face of it the site is doing well. Regular readers will know of my role as Chair of TeachVac, the job site matching teachers to jobs across England that pre-dated the DfE site. After reading the above paragraph, I wondered how the half a million jobseekers number was measured. For most of the time there has been no requirement to log-in and register to view vacancies on the DfE site, so was it just ‘hits’. In that case half a million might seem a low number over 12 months. I am not sure what the TES would claim, but TeachVac is in excess of 5 million ‘hits’ over the last twelve months and heading for 6 million for 2021.

The claim of 75% of schools registered with the DfE says nothing about how often they place vacancies on the site.

A casual glance at the around 1,500 vacancies shown as the total on the DfE site reveals a number of issues.

Firstly, not all vacancies are for teachers. Some are for teaching assistants and others for everything including cleaners, support staff, examination offers and cover supervisors. Secondly, not all vacancies are for posts in schools. Some are in Sixth form Colleges and other institutions not run under school regulations.

However, the most important issue is the number of unique posts on the DfE site. I raised this with the DfE directly recently, and have not yet had a explanation. As a result, I have tabled a Freedom of information request.

On the DfE vacancy site for teachers

How many of the published vacancies on 16th March or nearest available date with data were duplicated.

What was the number of unique vacancies on that day for teachers in institutions operating under schools regulations displayed on the DfE Vacancy site after excluding Sixth Form Colleges, other Further Education institutions and any private sector institutions and posts not requiring a teacher such as Teaching Assistant, cleaner, Examinations Officer and cover supervisor? Vacancies providing services across MATs and not linked to a specific school should also be excluded from the total.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes to respond to the FOI request. Since the answer should be available at the press of a button, it surely should not take long for a response, even after it has no doubt had to be checked at several levels within the Department before being released.

Last week, it was reported to me that one vacancy appeared several times on the site. I have no objection to such a policy if the total refers to ‘unique’ vacancies and not to repeats of the same vacancy, as such an approach to the total might be construed as misleading as to the usefulness of the site.

As I have pointed out before, TeachVac consistently has more vacancies than the DfE site, and teachers wanting a job in either the state or private sector can find them on TeachVac, but not on the DfE site.

However, the largest mystery of all is why schools are still spending £75 million on recruitment advertising when there are better uses for the cash. Perhaps the teacher associations and those responsible for school governance and administration can tell me the answer as to why so much cash is being spent on recruitment advertising?