Tag Archives: Institute of Physics

End ITT deserts

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Whatever else the re-accreditation process being undertaken by the DfE across the ITT sector achieves, it must end the ITT deserts so that schools across England can rely upon a flow of new entrants into teaching across the whole gamut of secondary curriculum subjects and the differential needs of the primary sector. Attention should also be paid to the needs of the special school sector and pupils with SEND in mainstream schools. The lack of a genuine plan for the training of teachers for pupils with special needs is a scandal than needs highlighting.

However, the needs of the secondary school sector are just as pressing. TeachVac, as well as the DfE and even the tes have built up extensive databases of teacher vacancies that should inform the discussions about where provision needs to be located.

Ever since the cull of providers in the late 1970s and early 1980s there has been a policy of rewarding quality of provision regardless of where that provision was located. The thinking presumably was that ‘trainees will move to the jobs’, so location of the preparation is less important than quality of the preparation. There may also have been a thought that providers of training could partner with schools in localities where there was no training provider.

With the coming of school-based training and employment-based routes, there might also have been an assumption that schools finding recruitment challenging could enter the market and train their own teachers. This produced a confused approach that tried to marry up a top-down model of place allocations based on quality with a ‘bottom-up’ approach on need for teachers that led to a disorganised picture.

In 2013, Chris Waterman joined me in producing a book of maps showing the locations of the various providers, and the routes into teaching that they offered. I have always been surprised that the DfE website on teaching as a career doesn’t offer such a map alongside its rudimentary search facility that only indicates whether a provider has places for a specific course in a manner unhelpful to applicants. The DfE did better in 2013 with its original School Direct application process.

The re-accreditation process provides an opportunity to look in detail at the national picture based upon actual needs for teachers that has been lost since the decision in the 1960s to take teacher preparation away from the employing local authorities and faith communities and transfer preparation into higher education. Wise though that move was in many respects, once the DfE started to let a thousand flowers bloom in the teacher preparation market this ended any national coherence around the provision in relation to the needs of schools.

The situation has become worse in areas where state schools are competing with private schools for the same pool of teachers and trainees. Turning a blind eye to that fact doesn’t help state schools, especially when there is a shortage of new entrants into the profession.

Whatever else the re-accreditation process achieves, if it doesn’t take into account the needs of schools across the whole of England for a reliable flow of new entrants across all subjects and phases it will have failed in what should be one if its major purposes.

More bad news on ITT

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Yesterday, The DfE published the ITT applications and acceptances data for the period up to the 20th June thus year. In this post I look at the acceptances for June 2020 compared with those in June 2019, the last year before the pandemic struck. By 2019, there was already concern about the decline in interest in teaching as a career. The pandemic to some extent reversed that trend and provided teaching with a recruitment boost. But, was it a false dawn?

The following table compares the June 2019 UCAS data on ‘offer’ with that from the DfE data issued yesterday.

Subjects2018/192021/22Difference in offers
Biology1430524-906
Science24301531-899
English22901418-872
Geography1010519-491
History11801000-180
Computing410290-120
Religious Education400304-96
Design and technology450355-95
Mathematics15901511-79
Music240228-12
Chemistry600597-3
Physics4004000
Business studies15019747
Art and design41046858
Physical education12901469179
Dramana334na
Classicsna64na
Otherna429na
Sources: UCAS and DfE

On this basis, as I warned in my previous post, 2023 will be another challenging labour market for schools. Only in the same three subjects where there is least concern in 2022: history, art and physical education, is there likely to be anywhere near sufficient supply of new entrants unless there is a sudden rush over the next two months that frankly looks unlikely at this point in time.

The science number is based on an aggregation of totals from the three sciences and doesn’t represent whole new category of potential trainees. The most significant declines in the number of offers since 2019 are English, geography and computing. However, at these levels most subjects won’t reach their Teacher Supply Model number unless there is a significant input from other sources such as Teach First. I am not sure how likely that will be as they don’t publish their data in the same way to the general public whatever they share with the DfE. There are currently more ‘offers’ in mathematics than there are in English and at this level, English departments may struggle with recruitment in 2023.

Overall, there have been 32,609 applicants by 20th June. This compares with 37,790 applicants domiciled in England that had applied through UCAS by June 21st 2021. There are 2,229 ‘recruited’ applicants in 2022, when there were ,5830 ‘placed’ according to the UCAS data in June 2021. The conditional placed or conditions pending groups are 18,363 this year compared with 23,620 in June 2021. Many of these will be awaiting degree results, and this number will reduce next month just as the ‘recruited’ number’ will show an increase. Interestingly, the number that have declined an offer this year is shown as 760 compared with 370 in June last year. Another straw in the wind of how challenging recruitment has become.  However, withdrawn applications are down from 1,520 to just 1,002.

There must be a concern that applications – as opposed to applicants – in the South East provider region are down from 14,390 to 10,795. This is the region with the largest proportion of vacancies each year, and where the private sector vies most strongly with state schools of all types for teachers. An analysis of acceptances by subject by provider region would help schools identify the seriousness of this decline, and whether it is in both the primary and secondary sectors?

Applications overall are down for both sectors, with primary down from 48,520 last June to 39,712 this June, and secondary down from 61,480 to 48,047, a very worrying reduction. School Direct salaried continues to be replaced by the PG apprenticeship route that has had 3,864 applications this year compared to 5,315 for the School Direct Salaried route. However, similar numbers have been placed on both routes, at around 500 trainees on each route.

With some schools ceasing recruitment as term comes towards its end, it will be up to higher education to recruit most of the additional applicants over the summer. Will those providers threatened with not being re-accredited show the same appetite to recruit as they would if their future was secure in teacher education? The DfE must surely how so as every extra trainee is a welcome bonus for schools in 2023 struggling to recruit teachers.

Blame it on Easter

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When design and technology is the only key subject recording more offers to would-be graduates wanting to train as a teacher in April 2022 than at the same point in the 2021 recruitment into training round, you know something unusual is happening.

Being charitable, one might ascribe the lack of offers to candidates to a combination of the timing of Easter this year and the imminent announcement when the data were collected of the 2022 ITT Training targets by the DfE. Apart from design and technology every secondary subject that I have been tracking since the 2013/14 round is recording lower offer numbers than in April 2021.

Of course, ‘offers’ defined as those in the ‘recruited’, ‘conditions pending’, ’deferred from a previous cycle’ and ‘received an offer’ don’t tell the whole story. Trends in applications are also a key barometer as they aren’t influenced so much by targets although Easter does affect when candidates apply, as does the forthcoming examination season for finalists that might not yet have applied to train as a teacher.

Applications to train as a primary teacher reached 31,925 by mid-April this year. The table shows how that number compares with recent years.

ApplicationsFebruaryMarchAprilMayJuneJulyAugustSeptember
Primary2016/173791041530442604672049350515905341054310
Primary2017/182643030540338103811041180443104690048060
Primary2018/192471028670322503585038880417904433045490
Primary2019/20202380027870319203599040180461804689048670
Primary2020/213024035770410204468048530513105294054230
Primary2021/22239672839131925

Source TeachVac from UCAS and DfE data

So, applications are in-line with pre-pandemic lows for April. As the data on courses with vacancies has revealed, (see my blog post on that topic) this is not enough to fill courses across the country and the government cannot take the primary sector for granted.

Overall applications to the secondary sector courses are a worry and the government should take notice.

Applications for Secondary CoursesMarchAprilMayJuneJulyAugust
2015785808759095160101700
2016814908758093530100000
201775850827708955097370
201859350673907846086790
201957860667407636084790
202057780683107935091100
2021728308430092160100720120070122310
20226175570253

 Source TeachVac from UCAS and DfE data

Only in 2018 and 2019 were applications lower at this point in the cycle. Hopefully, the data for May will show closer to the 90,000 number that is required to provide sufficient choice in many subjects.

Overall, some 37% of applications – note applications not applicants – have resulted in some sort of ‘offer’. According to Table 10.1 in the DfE data the percentage for design and technology is over 40%, but even that percentage won’t be high enough to ensure the target in the Teacher Supply Model is met.

 I don’t know why the DfE hasn’t issued the normal mid-month update containing this data, but it is available on their web site at Initial teacher training application statistics for courses starting in the 2022 to 2023 academic year – Apply for teacher training – GOV.UK (apply-for-teacher-training.service.gov.uk)

Ministers and their Aides may well want to reflect upon this data and its implications. Keeping fingers crossed that graduate unemployment might be on the rise and teaching looks like a safe bet in any economic downturn is one possible strategy, but at present it still looks like a gamble with the education of the nation’s children that has too risky odds. The data for May will be awaited with real interest.

Good news about Psychology

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Two thirds of ITT courses offering psychology via the DfE website no longer have vacancies. Nearly half the courses training teachers in Latin, and four out of ten of the physical education courses also no longer have vacancies, as of 4th May. That’s the good news.

At the other end of the scale, between 90-92% of the science courses still have at least one vacancy, with little difference between courses for biology, chemistry or physics teachers despite some generous incentives to teach the subjects. Most of the remaining courses have more than three quarters of courses still recruiting, including courses for primary school teachers.

This data is interesting because it reveals recruitment issues are widespread across England and not just confined to a few regions. If the latter was the case, then it would be likely that courses in some regions would be showing ‘no vacancies’ by now. Generally, that doesn’t appear to be the case except in psychology and the small number of other subjects were above average numbers of courses have no vacancies.

The next big challenge comes in June, when new graduates have to decide their future. Will the worsening economic outlook cause a recruitment bounce such as was seen in 2020 during the height of the first wave of the covid pandemic? Perhaps we will have to wait until 2023 before the labour market for graduates tightens sufficiently for graduates to turn to teaching.

Can we start to suggest that the longest period of teacher shortages might be drawing to an end with a spectacular array of unfilled places in 2022.

However, to really solve the teacher supply crisis, at least at recruitment into training of postgraduates, the profession has to look attractive to graduates, and the recent hike to more than 12% on loan repayments may well act as a deterrent. The outcome of this year’s STRB review of pay and conditions will also be crucial, as will be the willingness of the government to accept the Report.

The one good note for the government is the reduction in the size of the primary school population and thus, a likely requirement for fewer teachers in the next few years. This will especially be the case if the hard Funding Formula causes small schools to close in any numbers, making for more efficient class sizes.

Pupil numbers in the secondary sector will also level out, if not decline, in a few years’ time and that will also potentially take the pressure of training numbers for the secondary sector. However, if teachers continue to switch to tutoring or teaching overseas, then any decline in the need for teachers from a reduction in pupil numbers will be offset by a growing demand for other reasons.  

In the meantime, persuading new graduates to select teacher training might be where the government can best spend its marketing budget over the next couple of months.

Urgent Summit on Teacher Supply needed

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45,000 teacher vacancies were advertised so far in 2022. There were only 65,000 vacancies advertised during the whole of 2021, so demand in 2022 is much higher than in recent years. The pool of teachers to fill these vacancies has largely been exhausted, and secondary schools seeking teachers of most subjects, apart for PE, history, drama and art, will struggle to find candidates to appoint during the remainder of 2022 regardless of wherever the school is located in England.

The data, correct up to Friday 29th April was collected by TeachVac, the National Vacancy Service for all teachers. www.teachvac.co.uk The situation in terms of teacher supply at the end of April is worse than in any of the eight years that TeachVac has been collecting data on teacher vacancies.  

Schools can recruit teachers from various sources, including those on initial teacher training courses where they are not already committed to a school (Teach First and School Direct Salaried trainees are employed by specific schools); teachers moving schools and the broad group classified as ‘returners’ to teaching. This last group includes that previously economically inactive, usually as a result of a career break to care for young children or elderly relatives, plus those switching from other sectors of education including further education or returning from a period teaching overseas.

In extremis, where schools cannot find any candidates from these routes, a school may employ an ‘unqualified teacher’. This year that may include Ukrainian teachers displaced by the war as well as anyone else willing to take a teaching post. This was the route that I entered teaching in 1971. Generally, such teachers need considerable support in the early stages of their careers.

Normally, the labour market for teachers is a ‘free market’ with vacancies advertised and anyone free to apply. Can such a situation be allowed to continue? The DfE should convene a summit of interested parties to discuss the consequences of the present lack of supply of teachers facing schools across England looking to recruit a teacher in a wide range of subjects.

On the agenda should be, the effect of a lack of supply on the levelling up agenda; the costs of trying to recruit teachers; how best to use the remaining supply of PE, history, art, drama and primary sector trained teachers to make maximum use of scare resources, and how to handle any influx of ‘unqualified’ teachers.

The data for geography teacher vacancies, not normally seen as a shortage subject, reveals the seriousness of the current position for schools still seeking to fill a vacancy for September 2022 or faced with an unexpected vacancy in the autumn for January 2023.

jobs 2015jobs 2016jobs 2017jobs 2018jobs 2019jobs 2020jobs 2021jobs 2022
07/01/202225322024661635
14/01/20225679767547564192
21/01/2022561291301359311973164
28/01/2022114152165174159186106240
04/02/2022157188200220208265149324
11/02/2022182236235270262341206399
18/02/2022190261272302324436250471
25/02/2022190291318336356476268541
04/03/2022254349383370398537321625
11/03/2022289387438468477629375739
18/03/2022320423491492527712421834
25/03/2022367451537533592754487958
01/04/20223814875935806567945531078
08/04/20223815126386037478375781175
15/04/20224835656626398018706011220
22/04/20225506246956878269026641288
29/04/20226136807677888819667481440
06/05/20226527118258639861029814
13/05/202271576788493610631088903
20/05/2022778814932100711371153977
27/05/20228038459871068120811901043
Source: TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk

With recruitment into training for courses starting in September 2022, already under pressure the issue of teacher supply is not just one for this year. Unless teaching is made a more attractive career and steps are taken to ensure maximum effective use of the teachers available then some children’s education will be compromised and their future career choices put in jeopardy.

Keeping science teachers in schools

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This is an interesting article written with the support of The Gatsby Foundation on the effect of special retention payments on keeping mathematics and science teachers in state schools Paying early career science teachers 5% more keeps significant numbers in the classroom | Education | Gatsby Personally, I wish researchers would not talk about teachers leaving the profession when they mean no longer working in stated funded schools. These teachers might be working in private schools, the further education sector or Sixth Form Colleges whose employees are not captured in the annual Teacher Workforce Survey.

My other concern with this interesting piece of research is the regional bias to the data. As a result of using specific payments rather than the generic use of retention payments, most of the areas surveyed are in either Yorkshire and The Humber region or in the North East of England. The latter region offers teachers few opportunities for transfer between schools due to the limited number of vacancies each year compared with other regions according to TeachVac data www.teachvac.couk .

The fact of reduced numbers of vacancies on offer might mask a group of teachers staying in state schools, but moving to a different school. In Constable et al (1999) a research report for the University of Northumbria on the supply of teachers of physics, the ability to teach ‘A’ level physics early in a teaching career was an important motivation for teachers, as was the opportunity to teach mathematics rather than the other sciences for physicists when not timetabled to teach physics.

In a part of the country, such as the North East, with relatively little other graduate opportunities, especially compared to say the London region where not only are they many private school vacancies but also a buoyant graduate market, it would have been interesting to review the cohort in this Gatsby funded research with say a similar cohort of Teach First trainees to review any differences in the economic benefits between classroom based salary supported training and post-training retention incentives.

Of course, keeping teachers in schools is only part of the battle. Such policies help the schools where these teachers work but do nothing for other schools suffering as a result of the overall shortage of teachers in say, physics. Do subject enhancement courses that attract more recruits have a better economic return or could perhaps retaining other science teachers or even mathematics teachers to teach physics be more cost-effective than offering higher salaries to those that have chosen to teacher physics. Understanding, as Constable et al tried to do, what motivates physics teachers either to stay or to leave ibn more general terms might help devise new policies to overcome teacher shortages.

Tracking expertise might also be helped if Qualified Teacher Status was tied to specific subjects and only temporary accreditation to teach a subject was granted to those without the appropriate training and subject knowledge.  This might help keep better track of where shortages are to be found.

Forget the White paper: the crisis is now

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There must be a lot of nervous secondary school headteachers at the start of this Easter break. Over the past two weeks TeachVac has recorded 7,800 new vacancies for teachers. These vacancies have been posted by schools across England, but especially by schools in the South East Region. Nationally, the total is a record for any two-week period during the past eight years that TeachVac has been collecting data on vacancies from state and private schools across England.

I can confidently predict that not all these vacancies will be filled, and that some will be filled by teachers with ‘less than ideal’ subject knowledge. So bad is the situation nationally that one major international recruitment agency is offering a rereferral bonus of £250, presumably to attract new teachers to its books to help fill vacancies. With the size of TeachVac’s list of candidates that are matched each day with vacancies that puts an interesting valuation on the company.

Seriously though, TeachVac has an index that compares recorded vacancies with the reported number of trainees from the DfE’s census. This system has used a consistent methodology for eight years and is now also showing signs of how much stress the system is under. Not for twenty years, during what was the severe recruitment challenge around the millennium, have secondary schools, especially in parts of the south of England, but not exclusively in that area of the country, faced recruitment challenges on the present scale.

As readers of previous posts will know, the intake into training for September 2022 isn’t looking healthy either at present as was confirmed in the chat during the recent APPG webinar on the White Paper.

With fewer partners of EU citizens probably coming to work here as teachers while their partners used to work elsewhere in the economy, and the international school scene not yet affected by the geo-politics of the moment, it is probably correct to talk of an emerging crisis now reaching most parts of the curriculum outside of schools recruiting primary school teachers and physical education, history and art teachers in secondary schools.

The predictions about any crisis and its depth compared to previous years will be confirmed if there are a large number of re-advertisements in early May, especially if they come with added incentives such as TLRs and Recruitment and Retention bonuses as schools seek to ensure timetables are fully staffed for September 2022.

One casualty of the present situation may well be the levelling up agenda in a market-based labour market. All else being equal, where would a teacher choose to work, a school that is challenging or one that is less demanding?  Last spring, I wrote a blog about the challenges schools in the West Midlands with high levels of free school meals faced in recruiting teachers when compared with other schools in the same area. TeachVac is again collecting this data for schools across England.  However, with this level of vacancies we won’t have the funds to analyse the data this year.

Do graduates want to become teachers?

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TeachVac monitors published data on the level of applications to train as a teacher. This monitoring is in addition to its teacher job matching system at www.teachvac.co.uk.

Each month there is a post on this blog about ‘offers’ to would-be trainees and how numbers compare with the previous year. In 2020, there was a covid bounce in applications, as teaching looked like a safe career if the labour market was about to implode. Thanks to the furlough scheme and changes in working practices, graduate unemployment didn’t take off. As a result, 2021 was a more challenging year for teacher training than was 2020, and, from the ‘offers’ perspective, 2022 looks to be no better and potentially even worse in some subjects than 2021.

Another method of measuring the health of the trainee teacher market is to look at how quickly courses fill up with trainees. The DfE site that has replaced UCAS this year has the number of courses with vacancies by subject and sector and the total number of courses listed. It is, therefore, relatively easy to calculate the percentage of courses that no longer have vacancies. Now there may be reasons other than that the course is full for why the ‘no vacancies’ sign has been raised, but as a quick and crude measure it works. The number of courses can also vary from month to month, as providers either devise new routes or withdraw others.

Anyway, with those provisos, what is the state of play at the end of the first week of April 2022? Not good, is probably the best that can be said of the current situation. Overall, there has been little change in the percentage of course with no vacancies since a month ago, especially in the main subjects. The good news is that 58% of psychology ITE courses don’t have vacancies; the bad news is that 93% of physics courses do have vacancies. This is only 2% less than the figure at the start of March. Apart from in physical education, where only two thirds of courses still have vacancies, and that seems a high percentage for this time of year, most secondary subjects still have around four out of five courses showing vacancies.

Perhaps even more worrying is the fact that 84% of courses for intending primary school teachers still have vacancies. In part, this might be due to the plethora of such course on offer from multiple providers. However, in the past it would be expected that most courses would be full before April.

Of course, one drawback with this analysis is that it isn’t apparent as to whether courses have either just one vacancy that has been kept for a really well-qualified applicant or many vacancies. Such information would no doubt be useful to applicants.

The next two months are likely to see few final year students applying for courses as they focus on the completion of their degree courses, and the majority of applicants will come from career switchers or older graduates that have taken time out of the labour market.

New graduates remain a vital source of trainees, and it is to be hoped that after the degree results are announced there will be an uptake of interest in teaching as a career from that group. If not, this could be a really challenging year for providers: 2023 would then be a difficult labour market for schools.

Distribution of physics trainees

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The DfE’s ITT Census for 2021/22 was published yesterday – see previous post for the headline data. Over time, it will be possible to mine a great deal of information form the open-source information now provided by the DfE.

Those schools signed up to the new TeachVac service Are you overpaying to advertise your teaching posts? | John Howson (wordpress.com) for a registration fee of £100 plus VAT and  maximum annual charge of £1,000 plus VAT will be able to ask TeachVac staff to match this data with regional data for their area to help predict possible local labour shortages during 2022. So, if you are a school governor, headteacher or work for a MAT or diocese do read what is on offer and go to Teaching Jobs School Vacancies – The National Vacancy Service for Teachers and Schools (teachvac.co.uk) and hit the red tab at the top labelled New Matching Service

Taking physics as an example, the DfE data shows that the 537 trainees in the census are spread unevenly across the country.

Government RegionHEISCITTGrand Total
East Midlands292150
East of England161531
London5777134
North East12618
North West581674
South East6645111
South West371047
West Midlands341347
Yorkshire and The Humber332255
Grand Total342225567
Source TeachVac from DfE ITT census 2021   
Distribution of physics trainees

Approximately 43% of trainees are located in London or the South East, with just eight per cent located with providers in the West Midlands. This can be important because London and the South East contain a significant proportion of the country’s independent secondary schools. Such schools are more likely to advertise for a teacher of physics than do most state schools.

Many of the remaining selective schools are also in London and the South East, and they are the state schools most likely to advertise for a teacher of physics rather than a teacher of science. If just a quarter of the trainees in London and the South East opt to teach outside the state sector, this reduced the pool national to little over 500 trainees many of whom will be on school-based courses and not looking for a job on the open market.

A slightly different picture emerges for design and technology

Row LabelsHEISCITTGrand Total
East Midlands231033
East of England131629
London204363
North East4711
North West16521
South East212142
South West211132
West Midlands52961
Yorkshire and The Humber252449
Grand Total195146341
Distribution of design and technology trainees

Source TeachVac from DfE ITT census 2021

Here the North West looks like an area where recruitment will be a real challenge whereas the West midlands seems relatively, and it is only relatively, better off for teachers of this subject. However, we know nothing about specialisms with the subject.

This type of information is key to sensible recruitment planning and should play an important part in discussions about the working of the leveling up agenda in education at the level of the school.