Tag Archives: DfE

Welcome: Teaching Regulation Agency

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Welcome to the Teaching Regulation Agency. I mentioned part of its role in my recent post about Induction. Those interested can now read this new Agency’s Corporate Plan at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/696833/teaching-regulation-agency-corporate-plan.pdf I am delighted to see that Alan Meryick has become its first Chief Executive. He has two female deputies, but, perhaps, it was a missed opportunity to have a women at the top of the organisation. Alan’s name will be familiar to anyone that has read the outcomes of teacher misconduct panel decisions, where his name has regularly appeared as the civil servant that acted on behalf of the Secretary of State in exercising the final judgement on the decision – subject of course to either a Judicial review or an appeal to an upper tier court.

We now know, thanks to this Corporate Plan, that the budget for the TRA for 2018-19 is just under £9 million. This money is needed not just to administer not just the misconduct section, but also all the other work of the Agency. This work includes a whole raft of administrative tasks involved in managing the State teaching workforce qualification and registration system. For example, the Teacher Qualification Unit operational delivery will include:

  • the award of QTS and EYTS to approximately 34,000 teachers who complete either a course of ITT or EYITT in England
  • processing approximately 9,000 applications from overseas trained teachers requesting recognition as a qualified teacher in England
  • delivery of up to 75,000 new online certificates to teachers through the teacher self -service portal (TSS)
  • processing more than 380,000 pre-employment checks through the online employer access service
  • recording approximately 32,000 NQT induction passes onto the database of qualified teachers
  • issuing up to 35,000 teacher reference numbers (TRN)
  • answering up to 30,000 telephone and responding to approximately 35,000 email helpdesk enquiries.

The Agency will also deal with around 1,000 referrals of serious misconduct and hold around 150 hearing of misconduct panels that can lead to a teacher being barred for the profession, but not from being able to use the title teacher.

It is interesting to see that the TRA has a vision statement as I thought that they were now somewhat tout of fashion. The TRA vision is:

We will strive to achieve excellence in all that we do, delivering a fair and consistent regulatory system for the teaching profession on behalf of the Secretary of State. We will assess applications for recognition of professional status fairly and efficiently. We will support the teaching profession by ensuring high standards of conduct are maintained, by fair, rigorous and timely teacher misconduct investigations, that where appropriate, prohibit teachers guilty of serious misconduct. We will work to maintain the high quality standards of the profession, allowing every child access to high quality education.

Sadly, nothing there about protecting who can use the title ‘teacher’.

The tasks of this new Agency are vital in securing a workforce for schools, but it cannot do anything about the shortfall of trainee numbers. The DfE is now fully responsible for any shortcomings in that direction.

Finally, the Agency still has work to do to purge the references to NCTL that still litter its information documents about teacher misconduct hearings. The Agency might also wish to consider whether it is appropriate for the panel’s legal adviser to sit alongside panel members at hearings, in case it makes them look as if they are a member of the panel itself. But, maybe their diagram doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation.

 

Waste not: want not

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Are more teachers leaving the profession? Well it depends upon how you want to measure the outflow: by percentage or by actual numbers. The DfE helpfully provides the base number of new entrants and then uses percentages to show the degree of wastage from the profession over time. However, the actual number entering the profession each year fluctuates, as recruitment flows and ebbs according to how teaching is seen as a career. As a result a lower percentage remaining in the profession can still mean a larger number remaining in teaching when comparing retention over a particular period of service, but for different years.
The two tables demonstrate this quite clearly.

% of Entry as NQTs remaining in state funded schools
number NQT entering service YEAR 1 YEAR 2 YEAR 3 YEAR 4 YEAR 5 YEAR 6
1996 18100 91 84 79 73 71 68
1997 18900 90 83 77 74 71 69
1998 17800 89 81 77 74 72 69
1999 18300 88 82 77 74 71 70
2000 17600 89 83 78 74 72 69
2001 18600 89 82 78 75 71 68
2002 20700 89 83 78 74 72 70
2003 23000 90 83 77 74 71 69
2004 25200 89 81 77 74 71 69
2005 25700 86 81 77 74 71 71
2006 24000 87 81 77 74 73 71
2007 24400 88 82 78 77 74 71
2008 24400 88 82 80 77 74 71
2009 22300 87 83 79 78 72 68
2010 24100 87 82 77 73 70 66
2011 20600 88 83 77 73 69
2012 23000 88 81 75 71
2013 23600 87 80 74
2014 24200 87 79
2015 25500 87
2016 24400

 

Number of NQTs enterering, remaining in state funded schools as teachers
number NQT entering service YEAR 1 YEAR 2 YEAR 3 YEAR 4 YEAR 5 YEAR 6
1996 18100 16471 15204 14299 13213 12851 12308
1997 18900 17010 15023 14553 13986 13419 13041
1998 17800 15842 14418 13706 13172 12816 12282
1999 18300 16104 15006 14091 13542 12993 12810
2000 17600 15664 14608 13728 13024 13176 12144
2001 18600 16554 15252 14508 13950 12496 12648
2002 20700 18423 17181 16146 15318 13392 14490
2003 23000 20700 19090 17710 17020 14697 15870
2004 25200 22428 20412 19404 18648 16330 17388
2005 25700 22102 20817 19789 19018 17892 18247
2006 24000 20880 19440 18480 17760 18761 17040
2007 24400 21472 20008 19032 18788 17760 17324
2008 24400 21472 20008 19520 18788 18056 17324
2009 22300 19401 18509 17617 17394 17568 15164
2010 24100 20967 19762 18557 17593 15610 15906
2011 20600 18128 17098 15862 15038 16629
2012 23000 20240 18630 17250 16330
2013 23600 20532 18880 17464
2014 24200 21054 19118
2015 25500 22185
2016 24400

The source of the percentages is the DfE evidence to the STRB, published in January 2018.
Although the percentage remaining after one year of service has been on a downward path, the actual number been increasing due to more entrants into the profession. Sadly, the data for 2019, when it appears in 2020, will probably show a dip due to the poor recruitment into training in 2017.
What really matters, and isn’t clear from this data, is the breakdown between primary and secondary sectors and for the different subjects within the secondary sector. This is because those that remain must provide the majority of the new leaders every year. By year six, if there are half remaining in the primary sector that is between 7,500-8,000 teachers per cohort. With around 1,200-1,500 school leadership vacancies per cohort that means around 20% of teachers remaining by their sixth year of service might expect to be in a leadership position at some point in their careers.
Finally, it isn’t clear whether the DfE adds in late first time entrants to their original cohort or just ignores their existence. Hopefully, their contribution is recognised within the data, but not made explicit.

Are Education exports slowing?

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Last August I wrote a piece on this blog about UK Education’s contribution to the export drive under the title ‘Buy British Education’. This followed a research report from the DfE. https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2017/08/04/buy-british-education/

Recently, the DfE has updated the figures to include those for 2015. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-revenue-from-education-related-exports-and-tne-activity-2015 This remains a good news story for UKplc. Our higher education sector accounts for two thirds of the revenue stream in 2015, up from 60% in 2010. Further Education, presumably following the crackdown on colleges and visa infringements, has seen a two thirds drop in income to around £320 million. It had been looking in 2010 as if the FE sector would break the Billion pound barrier.

Happily, the independent school sector has increased income by 44% between 2010 and 2015, and brought in some £900 million in 2015.How they might be affected if further sanctions on are imposed on Russia is an interesting question. Despite a fall in income generated between 2010 and 2015, Language schools still brought in nearly £700 million more than independent schools.

As I predicted last summer, publishing is now being affected as the marketplace adaptation to new technologies gathers pace. Although income has increased by six per cent between 20-10 and 2015, that figure looks derisory compared with achievements elsewhere.  Qualification Awarding Bodies did exceptionally well, increasing revenue by 73% over the period between 2010 and 2015, and brought in £250 million that year.

Taken overall, total education exports and transnational educational activity that earned revenue for the UK saw a 22% growth in revenue between 2010 and 2015 to reach £19,330,000,000.

Of course, all the income flows aren’t in one direction and it would be interesting to assess how much net contribution education makes to UKplc after cash flows in the other direction are taken into account. During the period 2010-2015 that great British institution, the TES, was bought by an American Group and if were it making profits they would presumably be flowing overseas along with some of the company’s contribution to its debt pile.

TeachVac, the company where I am chairman, hope to start making a modest contribution to these export figures through www.teachvacglobal.com our recruitment site for international schools. As it is based in England, our income can be regarded as part of the export drive.

However, there are some worrying signs behinds the headline numbers. The DfE point out in the latest Bulletin that between 2014 and 2015 total education exports and TNE activity grew by 3.0%, 1.7 percentage points lower than the rate of growth seen between 2013 and 2014. This reflects the slightly lower growth rate in total education related exports which grew at 2.4% between 2014 and 2015, compared to 4.4% in the previous year.

We must now await the outcome of the UK’s departure from the EU to see whether or not it affects income, especially fee and research income received from overseas by our universities. Perhaps, if overseas students had been excluded from the immigration figures, some who voted leave might have felt differently about the referendum: or perhaps not.

Schools’ Costs

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At the beginning of February the DfE published a note to help the School Teachers’ Review Body (the STRB) and other interested parties understand about costs for schools in England at the national level over the period2018-19 to 2019-20. You can read the document at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/schools-costs-technical-note

Many school leaders and governing bodies will find the DfE’s analysis reads like something created in a parallel universe. Core funding over the two year period the DfE states is to increase at 3.1%, slightly ahead of government predictions of inflation at a predicted 2.9% over the same period. If these percentages turned out to be correct, then schools overall would find budgets under less pressure than expected. However, the DfE’s analysis doesn’t take into account any variations to local government pension schemes rates for employers, as they were not known at the time the technical note was put together. The analysis cannot also prejudge what the STRB will do about pay rates for teachers as a group. Will they hold the line or recognise the recruitment challenges schools in some parts of the country are facing and the system as a whole is facing in trying to entice graduates to train as teachers in some subjects.

The DfE also helpfully comment in their technical note that their high level analysis indicates that if the 25% of schools spending the highest amounts on each category of non-staff expenditure were instead spending at the level of the rest, this would save these schools an aggregate £1 billion that could be spent on improving teaching.

As regular readers of this blog know, TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk was conceived for this very same reason to offer a free recruitment platform for schools that would create savings from recruitment in order to support expenditure on teaching and learning.  We know that TeachVac is saving schools money now, just as the DfE’s own vacancy scheme will if it ever becomes an effective player in the recruitment market.

By 2019-20 the DfE sees academies as bearing the brunt of the cumulative net pressures as a result of the growth in pupil numbers and the fall in protection payments. The maintained sector will have to cope with the effects of local authorities retaining schools block funding for Education Support Grant (ESG) general rate duties over the three year period.

These figures act as a warning to the remaining maintained schools considering becoming academies. They need to consider the financial situation very carefully in the context of their own situation as well as these national figures to see whether they would be better or worse off.

The fact that the DfE has also apparently written to MATs and MACs where the chief officer earns more than £150,000 asking for a justification of the salary is also interesting. I heard one suggestion, not supported by the person making it, that these high salaries were the price the system paid for school leaders taking on the leadership of failing schools. A more insulting argument to the teachers and other staff working in these schools is difficult to envisage.

Might we perhaps be moving away from basic market economics and back to a negotiated national system of pay and conditions there are many that would welcome the better cost control such discipline would bring back into the system. However, the basic rules of supply and demand will always be difficult to ignore.

 

 

Most trainees teach close to where they train: no surprise there

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Last week the DfE published the fourth in their series of publications about teacher supply. Entitled, ‘Analysis of teacher supply, retention and mobility’ it can be accessed at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/682892/SFR11_2018_Main_Text.pdf Like the three earlier publications, it takes the School Workforce Census and the ITT Performance Profiles as the main sources for its data. As the authors make clear, this publication ‘aims to generate new insights, be an accessible resource to stimulate debate, improve the public understanding of our data, and generate ideas for further research, rather than to provide authoritative answers to research questions.’ (page2).

Much of the ground the document covers will come as no great surprise to those familiar with this field. However, there is a welcome aspect to this series of documents showing after many years of official neglect and even disinterest that these concerns are now finding more favour with the DfE as part of understanding the issues around the labour market for teachers. However, as our own TeachVac’s recent report into turnover of school leaders in the primary sector during 2017 shows, there remains much more work to be undertaken before the labour market can be fully understood.

Key features of the analysis by the DfE are that post ITT employment rates stand at 85% for the latest cohort where data is available, up from 75% for the 2009/10 cohort. However, the DfE still cannot count entrants into the independent sector; FE or Sixth Form Colleges so probably around 90% of postgraduates may enter some form of teaching after qualification.

Perhaps, not surprisingly, SCITTS have higher employment rates than HEIs. I suspect this is because more HEI trainees are likely to end up in teaching posts not covered by the DfE methodology and SCITT can offer teaching posts directly to their trainees. The existence employment outside the state funded school sector is given extra credence by the low outcomes on the employment measure for some pre-1992 Universities with only trainees in secondary ITT subjects.

Also, of no surprise given the distribution of ITT places, especially in the primary sector, is the fact that the North West region has the lowest outcomes for employment and the East of England the highest. A higher percentage of primary trainees end up in the state sector than do secondary trainees, again not really a surprise.

Most trainees start to teach close to where they train and then are more likely only to move locally. This means that many teachers may spend their careers in the same region. In 2015, possibly because of less competition from returners and a great number of vacancies than in 2010, a year during the recession, the distance travelled by new entrants was shorter. Young male graduates from HEIs were likely to move further than trainees from SCITTs.

Interestingly, teachers were more likely to move to schools with the lowest two Ofsted grades. This may be because such schools might shed staff after an inspection creating more vacancies than in schools with better ratings.  Overall, a part time female primary teacher has a 94.7% chance of moving 50 kilometres or less compared with 82.1% for a full-time male secondary teacher. Again, this is probably not surprising given that the former may have a stake in a community and a partner with employment locally. Their choice may be between either a local job or no job, whereas a male secondary teacher may be motivated to choose on a wider set of criteria including type of school and salary on offer.

The DfE conducted some interviews as a part of this work and recruitment difficulties featured as more of a concern than retention, with great concern over some secondary subjects: again, probably no great surprise.

Along with the recent work by NfER in the field of teacher retention, this study is worth reading and although the DfE support the value of a national teacher supply model, as indeed I do, there may be some benefit in evaluating whether some regional rebalancing of teacher preparation places might be appropriate.

However, if trainees cannot be recruited then, however, good the modelling, the outcome will always be that some schools will be unable to recruit the teachers they need and deserve. With rising pupil numbers driving demand for teachers, any shortfall in recruitment into training is eventually likely to affect school and pupil outcomes.

On Thursday, the next set of UCAS data on recruitment to training for 2018 will be published. The data will be watched closely and reported on this blog.

 

A National Vacancy Service

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Tomorrow, the DfE is holding a meeting to brief recruiters about its plans around a service publishing vacancies for teachers and school leaders. In the light of the demise of Carillion, is this new service a move based upon foresight by officials of the need to protect services from private sector enterprises or a belief that State operated services can do the job cheaper than private companies?  This is an important issue, since there are many in the government and among its supporters that see nationally operated services, of the type a vacancy service would presumably offer, as little more than a return to recreating nationalised industries.

At this point I must declare an interest for new readers of this blog. Some years ago, I helped form TeachVac to provide a free national vacancy service for teachers and for schools to save money on recruitment advertising, through the use of modern technology to bring together schools with vacancies and those looking to apply for such posts. TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk and its offshoot for international schools, TeachVac Global, www.teachvacglobal.com are now the largest since source for teaching posts in England and can help to attract teachers back to work in England. All at no cost to the public purse.

TeachVac also had the added bonus, of providing real time information on the labour market: something the DfE will no doubt also want to play up about their service. This week, TeachVac will have already a recorded record number new vacancies for teachers and school leaders since schools returned from holiday just over a week ago.

As I pointed out recently in the blog post about business studies teacher recruitment – blink and they are gone – a large proportion of vacancies recorded so far in 2018 are in and around London. As of yesterday, 58% of recorded vacancies in 2018 were from schools in London; the East of England or the South East with just 32% located in the other six regions. The percentage was the same for both vacancies in the primary and secondary sectors.

Is this because these areas are seeing the fastest growth in pupil numbers and are already adding new vacancies in expectation of their growing rolls? Is it because teachers in these areas are leaving in larger numbers. TeachVac Global is certainly seeing interest from teachers wanting to consider working overseas. Is it because these schools feel the new National Funding Formula doesn’t hurt as much as it could have done and they now feel more confident on their spending for 2018/19? There are other ways of answering these questions: TeachVac at least points out what to ask.

TeachVac will shortly be publishing two reports on aspects of the teacher labour market during 2017. One reviews primary school leadership and the other considers main scale vacancies in the secondary sector across England. Details of the cost and how to obtain them will be available on the TeachVac web site. As a free service, TeachVac is happy to discuss data provision for teacher trainers, schools, MATs, diocese, local authorities or indeed anyone interested in labour market real time data on teacher vacancies.

 

Requiem Collegium

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So the long journey for teacher recruitment, training and development has finally come full circle. From the establishment of CATE (the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education) and creation of the TASC unit (originally, Teaching as a Second Career- Lucy Kellaway please note this is not a new idea) in the 1980s, to the brave new world of the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) as an NDPB or Quango in the 1990s and then its successor the TDA, through to the NCTL and the return to being an executive agency of the Department in 2012 (with a Chair but no board), to the final announcement of the re-absorption of teacher responsibilities, except regulation, back into what I assume will be the Teacher’s Branch or Unit of the DfE, the  journey has led us finally back where we started.

In practice, the latest change probably won’t really make much of a difference and, even at its height, the TTA didn’t manage all teacher recruitment programmes. For many years, employment-based routes and the short-lived Fast Track Scheme were outside their remint. Teach First has always operated on a different set of governance rules in relation to the DfE. Ministers will now be directly accountable for the success or otherwise of the annual teacher recruitment campaign and the presentation of data about recruitment. Once the writing was on the wall for the General Teaching Council in England, the return of all teacher matters into the Department was probably only a matter of time.

As a one time employee of the Teacher Training Agency, and a long-time monitor of the working of teacher supply, will I shed any tears over the latest announcement: probably not. There are fashions in government delivery mechanisms, as in so many other areas of life, and the trend has been for simpler and more direct reporting arrangements over the past few years.

If I have a concern about the announcement, it is over the responsibility for professional development and the articulation of what a teacher can expect in developing their careers during a working life of 40 years. It is general knowledge that preparation courses of all types in no way cover everything a teacher needs to know to undertake the basic work of a professional successfully.

To move to new levels and different responsibilities needs more development, alongside the general changes caused by both research outcomes and the march of technology, let alone changes in society. The College of Teaching, when it is fully successful will play an important role, but the Department, with its access to the purse strings, must create policy. It could start with ensuring there is adequate preparation for primary leadership across the country. The dual academy and local authority system of governance, complicated as it is by the extra layer in the primary sector of diocesan schools, needs much more careful monitoring and attention than it has generally received over the past few years in respect of this key development priority.

So long as civil servants continue to take advice and discuss with others the approach to the recruitment, training and development of the teaching profession this move won’t harm the profession. But, it is worth reflecting why the journey was commenced more than 30 years ago.

 

School Recruitment Service Mark 2 announced

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Yesterday, at the Public Accounts Committee, a senior civil servant announced the date for the DfE’s latest foray into the world of teacher recruitment. The DfE’s version of a vacancy service will go on trial in the spring. Over the past two months, I have written a couple of posts about the development of this service, first mooted in the 2016 White Paper and then, somewhat surprisingly, rating a mention in the 2017 Conservative General Election Manifesto. In the meantime, the DfE has been quietly beavering away designing their service.

With political backing of this nature, such an idea wasn’t going to be ditched easily, unlike the plans to offer middle leaders to struggling schools, unceremoniously dumped this time last year. So, I am not surprised by the latest announcement.

As regular readers will know, I chair TeachVac, http://www.teachvac.co.uk the free service for schools and teachers that has been up and running for the past four years with no government aid and is now the largest platform by number of vacancies for teacher vacancies in England. More recently TeachVac has expanded to handle vacancies in international schools around the world through TeachVac Global www.teachvacglobal.com

As TeachVac is free to everyone using it is England, competition from the DfE doesn’t both us; although I do wonder about the size of the DfE’s budget that will be needed to ensure the new product doesn’t follow the route to oblivion of the School Recruitment Service that was established and then scrapped a decade ago. Perhaps someone could ask a PQ or submit an FOI to find out how much money they aim to spend on marketing the trial next spring?

For paid providers of recruitment services, whether, either just vacancy advertisements or through recruitment services and teacher placements, the threat to their profits is more real. You only have to look through the accounts posted on the web site of Companies House to see how valuable teacher recruitment has been over the past few years and why the government might have wanted to offer an olive branch to schools by providing a free service at this time so many schools are strapped for cash.

As I pointed out when starting TeachVac, such a service, like TeachVac, also helps satisfy the National Audit Office’s remarks about the lack of data available to the DfE about the teacher labour market. What they will do with the data they will obtain we won’t know until 2020 at the earliest, as 2019 will be the first full year they will be able to obtain data for a whole recruitment cycle. However, by then Ministers won’t be able to fall back on just the data from the School Workforce Census.

TeachVac, now covers all schools state funded and private – I wonder whether the DfE will offer their service to the private sector – as it does with access to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme – or restrict it only to state-funded schools thus offering a lifeline to paid services.

I will post more when I have read the transcript of yesterday’s Public Account Committee hearing where the announcement was made.

Nationalise teacher recruitment?

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Does the Prime Minister’s speech to the CBI Conference this morning leave us any the wiser about the future for a DfE managed teacher vacancy service? Since there were several mentions of education and in particular T Levels and higher education in the speech, I assume the DfE, and The Secretary of State’s Private Office in particular, will have seen a copy of the speech or even watched the recording on YouTube, assuming that they weren’t following it live as it was delivered.

The Prime Minster was, as you might have expected, looking to the future while at the same time reminding her audience of past successes, including the first industrial revolution and the number of Nobel Prize winners Britain has produced. Here are some of the phrases she used during her speech; ‘back innovation’; ‘support business people’; Invest in key public services’ and ‘deploy infrastructure for the long-term’.

She also said that there were choices to be made and government must learn from past failures. I am sure after the failure of both the Fast Track Scheme and the School Recruitment Service the DfE has been learning from the past. Dumping the scheme to provide middle leaders for challenging schools a year ago also showed a willingness not to take on schemes that won’t work. Indeed, as Yorkshire was one of the regions that scheme was aimed at, it is interesting to read the account in the Yorkshire Post of the success of the teacher recruitment programme run in Bradford over the past three years, although it does seem to have been a tad expensive.

So, should the DfE set up in competition with the free market? The TES, eteach, The Guardian and indeed TeachVac have been doing a good job matching schools offering jobs with teachers seeking vacancies. The TES embraced new technology and the internet almost two decades ago and eteach has always been an on-line platform.

TeachVac created new technology to develop into what is now the largest free site for teaching vacancies in England.

So, is there a place for government in this market place? You might argue that government can operate for the long run. But, the TES has been serving the market for more than 100 years and the others are not fly by night organisations. You might argue that a DfE led service would provide the government with better data about the labour market for teachers than they have had in the past and that’s difficult to deny, but they could obtain that for other providers at less cost.

You might also argue that the DfE can offer the service cheaper than the private sector, but with TeachVac already offering a free service to schools that is a difficult argument to sustain.

The Prime minster talked about government working in partnership with the private sector, even so it is difficult to understand why the DfE has chosen a company with little knowledge of the intricacies of the teacher labour market to undertake their initial work on the vacancy project. No doubt this is something the Public Accounts Committee can explore when they question the DfE on recruitment and retention.

TeachVac has demonstrated that the use of new and innovative technology can drive down the price of teacher recruitment: should the government of the private sector take the rewards?

 

 

 

A National Vacancy Service for Teachers?

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The DfE’s explanation of their aim for a national vacancy service mentioned in yesterday’s blog may have partly been provoked by the following parliamentary question answered on the 13th October.

Gloria De Piero: To ask the Secretary of State for Education, when the free national teacher vacancy website announced in the March 2016 White Paper Educational Excellence Everywhere will be operational. 

Nick Gibb: The Department is undertaking user research with head teachers, school business managers and recruitment staff and established, returning, aspiring and newly qualified teachers, to strengthen its understanding of the issues schools face when advertising teacher vacancies and the challenges teachers have finding and applying for jobs. It is using this to inform the development and design of a new national teacher vacancy service. We are currently at an early stage of prototyping the new service and testing to ensure the service design is one that best meets the needs of users. Depending on the outcome of this development phase, we would expect to start building a service early in 2018. 

Any teacher vacancy service will aim to reduce the time schools spend on publishing vacancies and the cost of recruiting new teachers; make it easier for aspiring and current teachers to find jobs quickly and easily; and increase the availability and quality of data on teacher recruitment.

So, who might be the winners and losers if the DfE does eventually go ahead with a national vacancy service? Much depends upon the structure and take-up of such a service, and it is too early to tell exactly what it might look like. However, assume a free full service model something like TeachVac already provides, but possibly with a few more bells and whistles in terms of handling applications, offering schools facilities for internal short-listing and the handling of references between schools.

Existing paid for vacancy platforms would either have to win the contract, assuming that the DfE puts the service out to tender; possibly at a much lower income than at present, or try to compete with free to schools government service. That scenario has happened in the past when the School Recruitment Service was launched in around 2009. However, the DfE seems to have learnt something from its past mistakes and will presumably be prepared to back any new service more effectively. Nevertheless, as ever, the issue remains as to whether the DfE service can persuade job seekers to come on-board and use the service as their main source of vacancy information or whether schools will continue to use other services, including paid for platforms?.

There is another issue if the government runs the service and that is access to the data collected. At present, the DfE has little management information on the working of the teacher labour market in real-time. A national vacancy service would change that situation, as we know for the data we collect at TeachVac. Indeed, it is one of the reasons for establishing such a service.

Will the teacher associations, the NGA, teacher educators and others with an interest in this area be willing to cede total control over the data to the government?

An alternative model would be for either some joint arrangements between all the interested parties and the DfE or just among the interested parties that train and recruit teachers. They have access to the teachers and trainee and could operate a ‘not for profit’ model at least as cost effectively as the DfE because they are already more commercially minded than the civil servants in Sanctuary Buildings.