Category Archives: technology

Job market starts to hot up

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By the end of February the recruitment site TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk had recorded just over 4,000 vacancies for secondary classroom teachers since the 1st January 2015, including more than 1,500 during February despite the half-term holiday period.

These are vacancies suitable for trainees, returners and those moving schools, but not seeking promotion. As the DfE have a rule of thumb that 50% of these vacancies go to trainees, this means that around 2,000 trainees may have found a job by now. As there were around 13,000 trainees at the time of the ITT census in November that probably leaves just over 10,000 left in the pool after allowing for those that won’t complete the training year.

As I have suggested from last autumn, not all subjects are faring the same. The trainee pool was probably down to below two thirds by the end of February in English, business studies, design and technology, social studies and computer science. Next week, mathematics, history, geography and the sciences as a whole will probably join the list. Business studies may fall below 50% left in the pool and next week, and there have already been more vacancies recorded in the South West than there are trainees in that subject.

With the bumper recruitment months or March, and especially April still to come, I expect some schools to face recruitment challenges in these subjects.

On the other hand, PE, music and art have seen relatively few vacancies so far this year and in PE some trainees may struggle to find a post, especially if they are not especially interested in vacancies across a wide geographical area.

London and the counties around the capital have so far seen the largest percentage of vacancies relative to the number of schools in the regions even though Teach First is active in London. By contrast, the North West has seen comparatively few vacancies posted by schools so far this year.

TeachVac is free for both schools and trainees to use and offers a range of data analysis to anyone interested in the labour market for teachers in England on a real-time basis.

TeachVac will soon be expanded to allow registration by returners and teachers moving between schools as well as adding promoted posts to the vacancies on offer. However, it will remain free to both schools and teachers allowing substantial savings over other recruitment routes. The video demos on the TeachVac site show both schools and teachers how to operate the TeachVac system. All that is necessary for schools is to know the difference between their URN and their DfE number when they register.

In return, schools that register vacancies receive a real-time update on the state of the market in that subject where it is one of the main curriculum subjects tracked by TeachVac.

If you know of a trainee or teacher looking for a teaching post in England, whether in the state or private sectors, or a school wanting to post a vacancy for free, do point them to www.teachvac.co.uk

First data from matching

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www.teachvac.com the data information system for teachers that monitors the job market for trainee teachers* wanting to work in the secondary sector has made its first matches after going live on Monday. With trainee teachers, schools, SCITTs and local authorities all registering and the system monitoring more than 3,000 secondary schools http://www.teachvac.com is creating a real-time database of the labour market for teachers.

Schools, local authorities, dioceses and others that register jobs will receive updates of the changing state of the market as part of the registration process. This provides participants with information on how the market for classroom teachers is developing for September 2015 appointments when they register jobs.

Take the example of design and technology as a subject where the ITT census last November revealed around 420 students on one-year preparation courses. Allowing for non-completion, there are likely to be around 400 possible trainees looking for jobs for September 2015. However, as a proportion of these trainees are in schools working on the School Direct salaried scheme they may be expected to be employed by the school where they are currently training. This reduces the ‘free’ pool to less than 350 trainees likely to be job hunting. The DfE estimates that 50% of main scale vacancies are taken by trainees. If that proves the case, then after we have recorded vacancy 700 in the subject there is a risk that the trainee pool will have been exhausted.

Using data from trainee notification of where they are seeking to work we can also identify both hot spots and areas where there may be shortages even before the ‘pool’ has been exhausted. The TeachVac team are able to create reports for interested parties on request, but at a cost as the basic service is free to both schools and trainees. For information can be obtained from enquiries@oxteachserv.com

Trainees also receive a helpful monthly newsletter about recruitment and tips on how to make the most of their application. Later we hope to offer a catch-up seminar programme for trainees once they have secured their first teaching job and can identify areas where they feel they need more preparation to cover issues and topics that they didn’t expect to be teaching.

If you know a trainee or secondary teacher looking for a classroom teacher vacancy for September 2015 please invite them to register at www.teachvac.com The same goes for schools wanting to publicise vacancies. As it is free to both schools and trainees they will be helping develop an entirely new system that tracks the changing labour market for teachers on a daily basis. Sadly, at present it is only England and just secondary. If anyone wants to extend it to primary schools then I know that the team at TeachVac would be delighted to talk with them.

* I am involved with the TeachVac project especially on the data and information side so declare an interest in the contents of the post. As the service is free to users they aren’t being asked to buy anything but encouraged to use the service for free.

17,500; 1,313; 3,500; 10; what’s the next number in the sequence?

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According to the Number 10 website:

17,500 maths and physics teachers will be trained over the next 5 years over and above current levels, with schemes to attract more postgraduates, researchers and career-changers, and extensive retraining for non-specialist teachers.

The scheme will cost £67 million and will include a programme to offer school leavers a bursary to help pay for university, in return for a commitment to become a teacher when they graduate with a maths or physics degree.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/maths-and-science-must-be-the-top-priority-in-our-schools-says-prime-minister

That deals with the first and last numbers in the heading. The second number is the shortfall against the Teacher Supply Model number across both mathematics and physics over the past three years. 3,500 is the number required each year above the existing levels to reach 17,500. Perhaps 2,500 more mathematics teachers and a 1,000 extra physics teachers or about double the present training targets for schools. Of course, some of the additional numbers will work in the further education sector and some might be trained as leaders in maths and science in the primary sector. Even so, this looks like a big ask along the same lines as Labour’s famous plan in the late 1990s to expand maths and science teacher numbers using the expertise of a leading supply and recruitment agency. However, perhaps the clue to success lies elsewhere in the press release with the slightly different wording of:

New programmes will retrain 15,000 existing teachers, and recruit up to 2,500 additional specialist maths and physics teachers over the next Parliament, on top of existing plans.

If the government is going to offer new undergraduate bursaries to physics and maths students without increasing the number of degree places specifically for students whose ‘A’ levels fall just short of current entry requirements it might just set up a bidding war between education as a career and the other employers that are seeking such graduates. Expanding the number of degree places is absolutely essential. An alternative would be an apprenticeship model for would be teachers that want to earn a salary from the age of 18 with a degree as part of the package but that would involve using university education departments as well as subject departments and as such might not meet current attitudes to teacher preparation.

The rest of the Prime Minister’s announcement was about computing and technology, including the new GCSE, and the rightful return of coding to the school curriculum. No doubt we have moved on from turtles hurtling around the floor of primary school classrooms to scenes of six year olds flying drones above the school playgrounds to take Arial photographs of the school in its setting with all the programming coded by the pupils. That might need some updating of primary teachers qualifications, but I didn’t see anything about that in the announcement.

I hope we can find ways of improving both maths skills for the millions and physics for the masses, but the muddled nature of this press release not even announced jointly with the DfE doesn’t fill me with any certainty about a successful outcome. Reflecting on Labour’s attempts more than 15 years ago, I fear history may be about to repeat itself.