The price of recruitment

Posted on October 13, 2016 by John Howson

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.

Right issue: wrong solution

Posted on October 6, 2016 by John Howson

Mrs May clearly identified some of the key issues facing the school system of this country in her speech to the Tory faithful in Birmingham. Ethnic minorities, white working class boys, house prices near popular schools, the issues are well known. Her solution; more selective schools. Nothing I have read yet about solving the teacher supply crisis and whether more selective schools would make that worse. Nothing either about the curriculum or ensuring enough schools in the right places.

Readers of this blog will know I don’t want a return to a selective school system. Interestingly, the TES has been looking at indicators from schools across Kent and Medway where there are grammar schools, secondary moderns and some comprehensives, including some faith schools. Do secondary moderns as a group have more vacancies per school than grammar schools and, because the census is in November when vacancies are low anyway, do they also have more temporary filled posts than selective schools, indicating a possible greater challenge in recruiting staff with the qualifications the school is seeking?

If the aim is to ensure achievement for all, the government will have to ask whether a National Funding Formula will be crafted in such a way as to assist in helping all those that currently don’t achieve as well as could be expected of them. The risk is that the Tories don’t really want to help everyone, but only to help those with aspirations they cannot currently fulfil. Listening to the Secretary of State on the radio talking about how well the three per cent of pupils in selective schools on free school meals do, when the average school has 14% of such pupils, didn’t fill me with hope. I have yet to hear anything from the Tories about those that don’t go to grammar school and how their aspirations will be met: enough teachers to go around would be a good start.

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, the organisation of our schools is a probably a key issue for many parents in the Witney Constituency where the Woodstock and Chipping Norton localities have the highest Key Stage 2 performance in Oxfordshire. This means that if some places in a new selective system are reserved for pupils on free school meals and the competition for the other places is heightened by the addition of many pupils currently destined for the independent sector some children would end up not in selective schools, whereas if they lived in another part of the country they might have passed the selection test. Such a system probably won’t be good for the local economy, as it might make Oxfordshire a less attractive place to live and educate your children if the lottery of location was replaced by the gamble around the selection cut-off level each year. It seems likely that even if primary schools improve their results, the same number of children will fail to gain a place at a selective school each year, but just at a higher level of education.

We must improve the school system for those it currently fails, but not at the risk of failing some that currently succeed.

You read it here first

Posted on October 5, 2016 by John Howson

The BBC Education page is carrying an interesting story today about exclusions as if it is news. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37340042 Regular readers of this blog will of course know that the data under discussion in the BBC piece first appeared on the DfE web site way back in July of this year and was featured in a blog post here on the 23^rd July 2016. I look a slightly different line to that of the BBC in their item today as readers can see.

Should the BBC have indicated somewhere that this was catching up on data published nearly three months ago? Or is it just enough to allow those that use the click-through function to discover this when they are taken to the DfE’s web site?

This is a legitimate question since Greg Hurst, the Education Editor of The Times picked up on the BBC story and ran with it in today’s paper. I don’t know why the BBC decided to do a piece on the increase in exclusions today and it is an important tissue. Digging more deeply into the figures it is important to know whether children in care are more likely to be excluded than those living at home and whether it is more of a challenge for local authorities to find places for some pupils that are excluded.

We are right to be intolerant of abuse, whether physical or verbal which represents the main reasons for exclusions, but why do some schools in challenging areas manage with far fewer exclusions that other schools in similar circumstances? It is easy for me to write those words as I am not a young teacher in a new classroom faced by a disruptive group of adolescents or a new head teacher trying to re-assert authority in a school where behaviour is not always at acceptable levels.

How important are school to school support mechanisms, whether from MATs, diocese or even, perish the through, local authorities? Do stand-alone schools exclude more pupils than those in some form of association with other schools? There are lots of legitimate questions to be asked from the data beyond focussing on the geography, as I admit I did in the start of my post in July and the BBC did in their item today, as I have indicated above.

Once the secondary school population starts increasing again it is likely the absolute numbers of exclusions could increase, but we much try and do everything possible to make schools secure and safe places for everyone, even those that create the challenges to authority.

Are Bursaries a waste of money?

Posted on October 5, 2016 by John Howson

About twenty years ago there used to be something called the Shortage Subject Priority Scheme that was the forerunner of today’s ITT Bursary Scheme. I recall that the then Treasury civil servants were sceptical of the scheme, claiming that it paid money to many who would have entered teaching anyway and that the marginal gains in recruitment came at a significant price that wasn’t worth paying. Fortunately that argument was dispatched with the counter-view that the cost of not recruiting sufficient teachers was greater in the long run than the expenditure on recruitment initiatives.

Today’s bursaries of up to £25,000, and even higher scholarships of £30,000, are far higher in cash terms than was ever contemplated back in the 1990s teacher supply crisis. Judging by the rates announced recently for next year they are still something of a blunt instrument. Clearly they are useful, but there are two obvious issues. Firstly, how do such high rates translate into discussions about starting salaries art the completion of a preparation course, especially outside London where the potential difference for a Physics PhD or 1^st class degree holder is not insignificant? The NCTL should be able to answer that question from the School Workforce Census by looking at the salaries of new entrants to the profession. Linking that data to ITT output data would be even more illustrative of how the market is performing.

The second issue is around the speed of response. To be really responsive the bursary needs to be adjusted in-year when recruitment is slow. Geography illustrates this point well. Two years ago recruitment into training was sluggish, but it picked up last year and using the UCAS data for 2016 appears to be performing even better this year. We won’t really know whether that is the case until the ITT census in November. Nevertheless, it was a bit of a surprise to see the increase in some bursary levels for the subject. However, it might be associated with the introduction of a scholarship in the subject.

The increase in IT bursary levels in IT and the cut in those for trainees in Biology are less of a surprise in view of their recruitment levels: it will be interesting to see what happens to recruitment in Biology as a result. It is difficult to assess the upward revision of the bursary for some trainees in English in view of the recruitment controls used this year. This move would suggest that the subject hasn’t fared as well as the imposition of recruitment controls suggested was the case. Again, we shall know more when the ITT census is published. It seems difficult to justify paying some trainees in Classics £25,000 in bursary, but not those in RE. Perhaps the NCTL can offer an explanation?

Of course, the whole bursary package, and the lack of it for some trainees, has to be set against a training landscape where some trainees receive a salary and other benefits, presumably taxable whereas for those on bursaries it can be more tax-efficient from the trainees point of view but doesn’t offer pension contributions. Whether this Smorgasbord of routes and financial incentives for those entering teaching is the means to maximise recruitment or whether a simple salary offer for all trainees, especially with the high conversion rate into the profession, would be a better approach is a subject for debate. Personally, I think it merits some degree of simplification.

Pause for thought on rural schools

Posted on October 3, 2016 by John Howson

The number of rural primary schools appears to be falling. In the 2015 list published by the DfE there were 4,906 such schools. This year there are just 4,151. However, before anyone rushes to the barricades to defend the remaining rural primary schools against a policy of wholesale closure it is worth remembering that the 2006 Education and Inspections Act that required the government to keep the list of such schools was passed before the programme of mass transformation of our schools to academy status was dreamed up by Mr Gove and more recently seemingly ratified by the White Paper issued this March. Regular readers will recall the resulting furore the idea of compulsory academisation caused, including within the ranks of the Tory party.

With rising rolls in the primary sector, I speculated in my post of the 6^th October 2014 on this blog whether it was worth the expenditure on the part of the DfE to continue to produce this list, but so far there hasn’t been any attempt to repeal the relevant section of the 2006 Act. I suppose it was because officials thought once all schools became academies it would automatically fall by the wayside. Now it won’t, at least for a few more years, so it might be worth either bringing all rural schools into the compass of the section or removing it from the statue book since it may offer one more reason why a school shouldn’t become an academy if in doing so it loses this protection against a review against closure.

Scanning the list I am glad to see the two Enfield primary schools remain among the five rural schools within Greater London; two in Enfield; two in Hillingdon and one in Bromley. The location of these schools in the Green Belt does stretch the definition of rural a bit, but I can quite see why they are included.

In am not sure whether Kielder First School in Northumberland is still one of the smallest primary schools in England, but with just 15 pupils according to Edubase it probably remains one of the most expensive on a per pupil basis and shows the challenge facing those wanting to introduce a National Funding Formula. Without a significant block grant element to such a formula, an element Mr Gove once wanted to abolish, such schools as this would close because they would not be financially viable. The cost of transporting the pupils to school each day would then fall on Northumberland County Council. With 78 such rural schools, this cost could be significant but would have to be met by cuts elsewhere in the County’s budget, even without adding in any academies not counted in this list. However, North Yorkshire, with 227 rural primary schools in the DfE’s list would be hit even more if their schools were affected by a National Funding Formula that didn’t somehow take account of their importance of our rural primary schools for many small isolated communities.

The complex inter-relationships between the government at Westminster and local authorities over the supply of education really does need to be thoroughly considered before and policy changes are made. Not to do so, risk unintended consequences not just for pupils but also for their parents as council tax payers.

Why are school under-performing?

Posted on October 2, 2016 by John Howson

There are times when I wonder whether the Tory announcements on grammar schools are merely a smokescreen to draw attention away from the fact that they haven’t been able to recruit enough teachers? Even if they genuinely believe that more selection will help some pupils do better, their responsibility as a government is to offer hope to the parents of all pupils and also to all pupils. The purpose of government is not to encourage any pupil to feel a failure. While Society accepts all cannot win prizes in competitions, education isn’t a competition, but rather an opportunity to draw out the best in everyone.

Rather than concentrating on what happens at eleven, when much of the damage is done, Mrs May might reflect on whether allowing local councils to axe Children’s and Sure Start centres was a good idea? My view is that the more we do to close the gap in the early years, the more that investment pays off later. The trouble is that the return isn’t a quick one, although narrowing the gap at the age when formal schooling starts might be helpful. The report last week of more children starting school not properly toilet trained, along with other reports of language and social skills gaps, shows the gulf we have allowed to develop in society between those with and those without. Hopelessness can breed extremism and all the risks history has shown us throughout the twentieth century that were associated with the consequences of allowing it to develop in a society. One wonder how far better education has helped create a situation where there are currently no wars in the Western hemisphere.

So, rather than concentrating on grammar schools and a way of finding an alternative to Free School Meals to measure deprivation, the Tories might want to look at the characteristics of children that fall behind expected rates of progress. Some have special needs, and these should be catered for. But, for others it may be attendance, where they sit in the class, the degree of encouragement from home or one of several other reasons that early years teachers can identify.

At present, the Pupil Premium helps one group of materially deprived children, but there may be others that are emotionally deprived, change school frequently and in mid-year, suffer from poor attendance or are caught by the digital divide, whether absolute or just governed by broadband speeds. These may not always be the same children. In this day and age we should know what works and help classroom teachers to identify and use the appropriate techniques, drawing on extra funding as appropriate. If, for instance the extra funding London schools receive over most of the rest of the country is shown to produce better results in a matched sample of pupils then we need to ask whether dealing with that issue should come ahead of creating more grammar schools.

What we need is a focus on quality assurance as a model and not quality control where those that pass the quality threshold go one way at eleven and those that don’t are sent down another path. Wherever that happens it is the wrong model.

Small fall in applicant numbers for graduate teacher preparation courses

Posted on September 30, 2016 by John Howson

Preliminary figures for applicants to postgraduate teacher preparation courses handled through UCAS show a fall in applicants domiciled in England of around 1,000 when compared with September 2015 figures. As a result, the number placed decreased from 21,710 in September 2015 to 21,150 this September. However, the number conditionally placed increased to 4,980 compared with 4,740 in 2015. Overall, this meant the decline was just over 300 in total compared with last year.

As this blog has reported already this year, the main reduction in applicants is among the 22-25 year olds, with part of the decline in applicants from these age groups being masked by an increase in career changers over the age of 30 having applied.

Overall, it looks as if the percentage accepted rose slightly from 62% of applicants to 63% this year. There was a further, albeit small, decline in the number of men applying, from 15,900 in 2015 to 15,570 this year.

London remains the most popular place to become a teacher, despite the additional costs associated with living in the city, with 27,530 applications for courses in London. However, this was down from 29,530 in 2015, whereas applications increased in the North East, East Midlands and in Wales.

Although there were more applicants placed on secondary courses in 2016 compared with 2015, up from 14,600 to 15,750 (including those conditionally placed and holding offers) the number placed on primary courses has fallen by over 1,000 from 12,970 to 11,510. This must be a matter for concern as it may well lead to shortages of new entrants in some areas for primary main scale vacancies in September 2017.

There seems to have been little change in numbers on the the School Direct Salaried route, at around 3,300, possibly because of small fall in applications for this route despite the general increase in applications from older graduates.

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.

Biology – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number

Business Studies – acceptances above 2015, close to TSM, but the TSM isn’t large enough to meet demand from schools for these teachers.

Chemistry – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number.

IT/computing – acceptances below last year and not enough to meet TSM.

Design & Technology – the position is unclear from the UCAS data but TSM may not be met.

English – acceptances similar to last year and should meet TSM number.

Geography – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number.

History – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number.

Mathematics – acceptances above last year, but probably still not enough to meet the TSM number.

Music – acceptances above 2015 and should meet TSM number.

Physics – acceptances above 2015, but probably still not enough to meet the TSM number.

Physical Education – acceptances below last year due to the effects of the recruitment controls, but should be enough to meet TSM.

Religious Education – acceptances below last year and not enough to meet TSM.

Languages – difficult to determine exact position from the UCAS data, but should easily meet TSM number on the basis of acceptances.

On the basis of the above, we can already express concern about the supply of business studies, design and technology and physics teachers for 2017. Schools needing to look for a teacher of English that aren’t either linked to Teach First or with a School Direct salaried trainee may be potentially facing problems, especially in those areas where there is keen competition for teachers between the private and state sectors.

The government may be able to anticipate the ITT census with a degree of relief this year, assuming that a sufficiently large number of those still shown as conditionally placed actually turned up when courses started. If they didn’t, for whatever reasons, then this relatively optimistic assessment will have proved meaningless.

Teacher Recruitment – The text of a talk to senior leaders in Birmingham

Posted on September 29, 2016 by John Howson

Earlier today I talked to a workshop for senior school leaders in Birmingham. I have posted the substance of my talk below for anyone interested, whether from Birmingham or elsewhere.

Is there a crisis in teacher recruitment? When I was growing up in the 1950s there was a radio programme called the Brains Trust where one panellist often started his remarks with ‘it all depends upon what you mean by ..’. I guess that is a good starting point here. It all depends upon what you mean by a recruitment crisis.

Since every child must have a teacher for every lesson on the timetable and we don’t send large numbers away untaught, the government is right to say, ‘crisis, what crisis’ in absolute terms. But, dig a little deeper and the certainty of that statement looks a little less secure.

How can we measure the possibility of a crisis?

There are two key indicators;

The intake into teacher preparation courses compared with determined need
The percentage of pupils or lessons taught by appropriately qualified teachers.

Another indicator, developed by TeachVac, is to consider whether different types of school have different recruitment experiences? Interestingly, the DfE has recently started to look at the evidence on this point in relation to retention and they recently published their first paper looking at the results from the School Workforce Census over the past 5 years.

But, let’s start at the beginning.

The DfE decides on training numbers using the Teacher Supply Model. After years of secrecy, this is now published each year, although not many people seem to make use of it. From the Model’s output the NCTL/DfE allocate places to providers on Teach First, the 2 School Direct routes, on SCITTs and to higher education and other providers.

Each November, the DfE publishes the ITT census that reveals the numbers on preparation courses and hence the likely number of new teachers that will enter the labour market the following year because the vast majority of those training to become teachers in secondary schools are on one-year programmes – Teach First is the main exception and until last year was outwith the TSM calculations.

Thus, intending teachers fall into 2 key groups; firstly, those on programmes where they enter the classroom almost straight away – Teach First and SD salaried – and where many will presumably stay at the school where they are working after completing training, assuming that they stay in teaching.

The remainder of trainees are what might be called the ‘free pool’ of possible new entrants since their preparation course doesn’t tie them in any way to a particular school, although some will be offered a teaching post in the schools where they are placed during their course.

This distinction is important because in some subjects, English is a good example, the difference between the ‘free pool’ and the trainee total number can now be quite significant. The total trainee number in the 2015 census for English was 2,283 trainees, but the free pool – after allowing for non-completers – was just under 1,400 trainees; a difference of around 900. This is a substantial number potentially not available to all schools. After all, schools with trainees outside the ‘free pool’ can also fish in that pool if they need to, but it may be harder for schools that rely on the ’free pool’ to tempt other trainees away to their school from the other routes.

In this way the re-orientation of the teacher preparation market may be having consequences the government has yet to fully understand. We will be discussing the possible apprenticeship model later: but where those numbers come from will affect the size of the ‘free pool’; quite dramatically so if they reduce new entrants in Year 1 of the other routes in some subjects.

So, let’s go back to the beginning again. Is there a recruitment into training crisis?

We can classify secondary subjects into three groups

Those where the national answer is No; PE, history, Art and languages, plus probably the biological sciences are in this group

Those where the answer is YES: design & technology, business studies, physics

Finally, those where there are problems in some years: effectively all other subjects. Based on the 2015 numbers, RE, IT, geography and English fall into that group. Next year, we expect geography and possibly English to be much better placed based on our analysis of applications to train in 2016/17, but it won’t be until the census is published in November that we can be certain of our predictions.

Nevertheless, there will be recruitment issues in 2017 in design & technology, business studies, physics: of that fact we can be pretty sure even now. For some subjects, this will be the 5^th year the TSM figure hasn’t been reached.

There isn’t time here to go into how the TSM figure is calculated and why, for instance, in English it under-estimated need for a couple of years and has consistently over-estimated training need in PE in recent years.

So, a quick word about demand. TeachVac receives data about job vacancies from over 3,500 secondary schools every day. It’s a free service to schools, teachers and trainees and schools that directly enter vacancies receive our latest update about the current size of the trainee market.

Because we monitor real vacancies linked to real schools we can drill down to regional data on a daily basis. I can tell you that the West Midlands was 5^th in the regional list for vacancies per school.

In Birmingham, between January and the end of August this year, TeachVac has recorded a 30% increase in vacancies compared with the same period in 2015, up from 351 to 456 with all subjects except IT, business studies and art recording either an increase or no change. Although there isn’t time to go into the details, maths and the sciences were the top two recruiting subjects. When I looked last evening, it was still 29% ahead of last year by28th September.

As you would expect, March to May is the peak recruitment season. But it is worth recalling that January 2017 vacancies will need to recruit from the same pool as September vacancies since there are few new trainees entering the market outside of the September starting point. By now most trainees that want a teaching post have found one and schools need to rely more heavily for January on movers, returners and re-entrants to fill basic grade vacancies where there aren’t enough new entrants. The DfE currently suggest between 50-55% of main scale vacancies across a recruitment cycle go to new entrants to teaching in state schools.

Looking at Birmingham schools, using TeachVac data, we could detect a sight tendency for schools with more pupils on Free School Meals as a percentage of the school roll to advertise more vacancies, but we need to do some more work on this issue over a longer-time period and at present we don’t have the funds to do so.

I mentioned at the start a second indicator of the percentage of qualified teachers in each subject. Nationally, these figures are going in the wrong direction, but as QTS allows anyone to teach anything to anyone at any level we don’t know what this actually tells us about the recruitment problem.

To conclude, there is a recruitment issue, it is not universal, but will become worse as pupil numbers increase over the next decade unless the government recruits sufficient teachers into the profession. This is a challenge it has never been able to meet when the wider economy is doing well, especially with the demand for graduates increasing. More graduate level jobs means more pressure on teaching as a career and the recruitment messages have to be better and more sophisticated.

In 1997, I recall launching the TTA’s internet café exhibition stand at a career’s fair in Birmingham putting teaching at the forefront of new technology. If you look at TV advertising today which can you recall of the 2016 campaigns, the Royal Navy, I was born in … but made in the Royal Navy, or the latest train as a teacher campaign?

The fact that there are fewer Royal Navy personnel in total than the number of trainees we need to see enter teacher preparation courses every year for at least the next decade makes you think.

Thank you for listening.

Application apathy?

Posted on September 27, 2016 by John Howson

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

Posted on September 27, 2016 by John Howson

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