This is an interesting way to start 2022. Just three years since the tes last changed hands, its ownership looks to be on the move again. This would make the third set of owners of the tes since TeachVac was set up in 2013 to challenge the high cost of teacher recruitment in a changing world, where technology should have been driving down costs and thus reducing prices to schools. www.teachvac.co.uk According to the press release 86c854e3-7a1d-4402-9f20-32868488d2c6 (gcs-web.com) dated the 7^th December the new owners should be the current management team at the tes and ONEX, a Canadian Venture Capital Group. My best wishes to them.

When the Providence Group bought the tes in 2018, I expressed surprise at the purchase, so I am not now surprised that after slimming down the business by: exiting the supply teacher market; ending coverage of the further education sector; shifting its office functions out of London and axing the print edition among other changes, Providence finally put the business up for sale.

Based on the cost structure of TeachVac, there is a profitable company lurking inside the tes, but not while it is saddled with a large slug of overhanging debt that needs to be serviced. The terms of the expected change of ownership are not revealed in the press release, but too much debt will cripple the success of the new venture. Still, it is good to see the management team taking a share of the risk, and bringing at least a part of the ownership back into the UK from North America.

Today’s Sunday Telegraph business section has an article by Matt Oliver discussing the problems the tes faces when government tries to do the same job through its own free web site for vacancies. This blog discussed such an issue in relation to both TeachVac and the TES in April 2019 DfE backs free vacancy sites | John Howson (wordpress.com) I am sorry that Matt Oliver didn’t either mention TeachVac or try to speak with me about the way the market operates, as other journalists have done on a regular basis.

Perhaps either the Education Select Committee or the Public Accounts Committee at Westminster will use Matt Oliver’s article as a reason to mount an inquiry into the teacher recruitment market. After all, the later, using National Audit Office data, called for the DfE to reduce the cost of teacher recruitment: the very reason that TeachVac was established and has flourished. Does Nationalisation always work? | John Howson (wordpress.com)

This blog has always asserted that schools have been paying too much for recruitment advertising and has been prepared to back that judgement with the development of the successful TeachVac job board. The apparent lack of interest on the part of professional associations and others connected with education to address the means of removing unnecessary expenditure from schools by slashing recruitment advertising costs has been an enduring disappointment to me. Perhaps 2022 with be the year that all this changes?