Silly Numbers

Posted on May 12, 2023 by John Howson

The last time that I saw teacher recruitment in the state it is in 2023 was just over twenty years ago, at the start of the current century. Since TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk was established, some eight years ago, we have been keeping weekly records of the number of vacancies against the ‘free pool’ of possible new entrants from ITT courses not already working in a school. The methodology hasn’t changed, although it is the direction of travel rather than the actual numbers recorded each year that is really of relevance.

Now we are hallway through the main recruitment month for classroom teacher vacancies for September appointments, and with the coronation weekend out of the way, it is possible to make some assessment of the 2023 recruitment round. One factor that is new this year is the incidence of strike action, and the associated uncertainty of the outcome of the pay dispute.

However, the key message seems to be that while recorded vacancies continue to increase, when compared with the same week in 2022, the increase is not as great as witnessed last year. Indeed, much of the problem with recruitment may be down to the collapse in ITT numbers in some subjects rather than an absolute growth in vacancies.

Interestingly, business studies and design & technology, the two real shortage subjects, seem to have found a ‘floor’, and although still the worst subjects in terms of vacancy rates in relation to new ITT entrants, the situation is these two subjects is no worse than last year, and trending by the end of term to become slightly better than last year. Perhaps schools have given up the unequal struggle of trying to recruit such teachers.

Good luck to schools recruiting between now and January in all secondary subjects, because it will become an increasing challenge. Perhaps now is the time for some discussion about the most cost-effective, and also effective from an education perspective, means of sharing out our scarce teaching resource.

Although TeachVac benefits from the cash spent on recruitment, we spend part of the income identifying the parts of England where there is less interest in teaching posts, and supply is especially challenging if measured by interest in vacancies. There are certainly parts of England where despite the ITT reforms there are not enough ITT places to meet demand and where interest from outside the locality is limited, either because of high property prices or a lack of perception of the area as an interesting area in which to work.

The news this week from the Bank of England that the UK will avoid a recession isn’t good news for teaching. So long as salaries remain depressed; working conditions challenging and morale low, teaching will not attract the graduates it needs, especially if either the private sector is hiring graduates or individuals can take the risk of setting up their own businesses.

With the falling pupil numbers in primary schools, now may also be the time to look at offering primary trained teachers struggling to find teaching posts work with Key Stage 3 pupils. However, that would need some degree of organisation that the system still lacks. MATs with all-through schools may be able to identify how such teachers can be most effectively used. Perhaps there is room for a small-scale research project?

Consequences, and a bit of history

Posted on September 30, 2022 by John Howson

Now that the DfE has published the list of accredited ITT providers, I thought it might be interesting to reprise the post below from 2013 that highlights the start of the journey to where the sector is today.

The list of reaccredited providers, published by the DfE, seems to have radically slimmed down the school-based side of ITT at the cost of a few higher education establishments also having accreditation withdrawn. If the list is correct, when some long-established providers of ITT will no longer be involved in teacher preparation as a top tier provider and will need to partner with another accredited provider.

The geographical implications of the loss of some providers will take time to work out, but South East London may we one area affected by the changes. Some long-established SCITTs seem to be no more, but some of the overtly religious SCITTs seem to have survived.

Clarity ahead of Select Committee – but still not good news

Posted on September 9, 2013

What has become clear this afternoon is that the DfE may have faced a dilemma last autumn. With the national roll-out of School Direct being enthusiastically taken up by schools, it could either have effectively wiped-out the university-based PGCE courses by meeting the demands of schools or it could have denied schools the places they were asking for in School Direct. The DfE targets for secondary subjects did not allow the third option of satisfying both schools applying for School Direct places and keeping the PGCE going and still keeping within the targets. The extent of the problem can be seen by comparing Table 2b in the underlying data of Statistical Bulletin 32/2013 issued by the DfE on the 13^th August and Figure 1 of the School Direct management information published this afternoon by the National College for Teaching and Leadership. In practice, the DfE seems to have chosen a third way by creating inflated ‘allocations’ to try to keep higher education going, but still to satisfy the demands from schools for places. This exercise risked substantial over-recruitment against the real targets.

So, what happened? Looking just at the STEM subjects, Chemistry had an allocation of 1,327 in the Statistical Bulletin, but a target of 820 places in Figure 1 of today’s document – a difference of 507. To date, recruitment has been 900 according to Figure 1, so the subject is over-recruited against target, but significantly under-recruited against allocations. School Direct, where bids totalled 422 places last November, and reached around 500 by the time all bids had been collected, apparently recruited just 260 trainees, leaving higher education to recruit the other 640.

Sadly, in Mathematics, Physics, and Biology, despite the target being well below the allocation figure, the target has not been met. In Physics the shortfall is 43% against the target; and in Mathematics, 22%. In Biology it is just 6%. However, these percentages do not reflect the actual numbers who have started courses; that number may be greater or smaller than those released today.

Indeed, in no subject was the allocation met, although in business studies it was missed by just one recruit. However, the target in this subject is apparently higher than the allocation in August, although that may have something to do with classification. Less clear is the Religious Education position where the target is shown as 450, but the allocation in August was 434 for postgraduate courses. Somewhere another 16 places have been added since August when they have been subtracted in most other subjects.

I have suspected for some time that the allocations were above the level required by the DfE’s model, and have hinted as much in earlier posts. More than 40,000 trainees did seem an excessive number to train.

School Direct works in subjects where there are lots of high-quality applicants looking to train as a teacher. At the other end of the scale are subjects where either the schools didn’t bid for many places, as in Art & Design or recruitment is a real challenge, as in Physics.

These are the subjects where School Direct faces its greatest challenges for 2014, and where the DfE/NCSL seemingly still cannot do without higher education.

What is also clear is that the DfE cannot repeat this same exercise this autumn for 2014 recruitment. It will have to make it clear how many trainees are needed according to the model. If it does not do so, students will be paying £9,000 in fees without knowing whether they are a target or an allocation, and totally uncertain about their chance of securing a teaching post. That won’t attract many takers in an improving graduate job market as the risks are too high.

Over the next few weeks, it will be interesting to see how the effects of the reaccreditation pan out both for providers and for those seeking to start to train in 2023. In the 1980s, I worked at a college where ITT had been withdrawn. It was not a happy place to be. I, therefore, send my best wishes to all those involved in the outcome of the reaccreditation process.

Bad News?

Posted on April 1, 2022 by John Howson

At the recent NfER webinar on the labour market for teachers some scarry numbers were banded around for this year’s applications for ITT postgraduate courses. On 30th March the DfE released the latest data on applications up to 21^st March 2022. 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) For comparison purposes, in 2021, the similar UCAS data was up to the 15th March, so this year’s data contains numbers from an extra week.

Despite the extra week compared with last year, overall candidate numbers at 23,264 are below the 27,170 cited as being domiciled in England in the March 2021 UCAS data. In reality, the DfE’s 23,264 includes around 3,000 domiciled outsides of England, including 514 from Northern Ireland and 2,000 from the EEA plus ‘rest of the world’. So, the domiciled in England number is perhaps no more than 23,500 at best. This would be more than 3,000 below the March 2021 number. Not good news.

Equally disturbing is that the decline in candidates from across the age ranges, with a notable decline in the 25 to 29 age group from 5,900 in 2021 to 4,684 this March. These are often career switchers dissatisfied with their initial career choice after graduation, and choosing teaching as a second career. One of the smaller reductions is in the youngest age group of those age 21 and under, where this year’s number is 4,227 compared with 4,490 in March 2021.

This year, there 6,525 men have applied to become a teacher, compared with 7,620 in March 2021. Female applicants are down from 18,930 to 16,525 for the same comparative period. Last year, by March 2021, 680 men had been ‘placed’ or what is now termed ‘recruited’. This year, 234 have been recruited by March. Fortunately, only 1,515 men has been unsuccessful so far with their applications, along with 2,619 of the 16,525 women.

Applications, as opposed to candidates, are down from 79,790 in March 2021 to 61,755 this year. Higher Education has had 29,566 applications this year compared with 37,050 in March 2021. Not surprisingly, apprenticeship applications are up from 1,680 last year to 2,397 this year. However, the School Direct salaried route only has 3,618 applications compared with 6,460 in 2021. Only 14 have been recruited to this route compared with 40 placed by March 2021. SCITT numbers at 8,458 compared with 9,490 seem more buoyant than the other school-based routes.

Providers across England are reporting lower regional numbers for applications, with London applications down from 16,740 to 14,277 and in the South East from 10,540 to 7,605. Only in the Yorkshire and The Humber Region does the fall seem smaller, at 7,052 compared with 7,980 in March 2021.

These number make for grim reading in a month where TeachVac recorded record numbers of vacancies for teachers posted by schools across England. The aims of the White Paper published earlier this week cannot be met if there are not enough teachers. I still think the NfER prediction for physics that less than 20% of the target number would be reached is alarming, but it is almost certain that the target will be missed for another year, and not only in physics, but also in a range of other subjects.

After 12 years in power at Westminster, a solution to the teacher supply problem must be found by the present government.

Recruiting into teacher preparation: the DfE website

Posted on November 9, 2021 by John Howson

Now that the DfE have taken over recruitment to postgraduate teacher preparation courses I have been looking at their web site of providers. On the whole it is a pastiche of the former UCAS offering, with the same faults and good points.

The key good point is that it is comprehensive and has a lot of different filters. Whether or not they are the filters applicants will want to use is another matter. On the downside there is no map of either location of courses availability of places.

Many years ago, universities leant that not having a place name in your title could be a disadvantage, as applicants might not consider you if they didn’t know where you were located. As a result, Trent became Nottingham Trent, and Brookes, Oxford Brookes. Of course, some universities can manage without a place name such as King’s College, London and University College, but they are both technically colleges and not universities.

How many applicants know that Orange Moon Education is offering Classics courses in Nottingham and Bristol and possibly Bradford as well unless they delve into the Orange Moon site or where The South East Learning alliance is offering training?

The last time the DfE was involved in the application process, when the School Direct Scheme was first established, the DfE included more data on the number of places still on offer from each course and the number filled on its web site. I always thought that was a useful tool for applicants as places filled to know the possible risk of applying to a nearly full course against applying to one with more places available. However, long-time readers of this blog from 2013 will recall the difficulties that resulted from my use of the data on applications and places filled.

Some years ago, Chris Waterman worked with me to produce a book of maps showing the location of providers and their different type of provision. As a former geography teacher, I still think that some visual representation of provision would be useful. Such mapping might show potential trainees where the competition for jobs might be fiercest, especially if it was overlayed with vacancy rates for the different subjects and sectors.

It is interesting to see that as I write this blog in early November there is already a difference between the total number of courses available and the number of courses with vacancies on the DfE site. In design and technology, there are 443 courses listed, but only 426 have vacancies: 17 apparently don’t have vacancies. For physics, the numbers are 736 and 716, a difference of 20. This begs the question of, if there are only around 1,100 places to train as a physics teacher how many of the 736 courses are real opportunities and how many sub-sets of an offering with some slight difference, and does this matter? Around 8% of primary courses are currently not on the list for courses with vacancies.

By Christmas, the DfE will have a good idea of how the recruitment round is shaping up. With the international school job market opening up again, training teachers will become as important as filling the vacancies for lorry drivers for the future of our economy.

More doctors: fewer teachers?

Posted on August 6, 2021 by John Howson

The news that the government may be raising the cap on places at medical schools for trainee doctors is surely a good outcome for society, but may be a concern for those that are involved with teacher preparation courses.

Both are areas of funding where the government keeps close control over the supply of places. As has been discussed in previous posts on this blog, the recent market review into ITT by the DfE plus a falling birth rate and a reducing school population due to outward migration and an increase in home schooling, has raised the spectre of reductions in the number of primary teacher training places likely to be sanctioned in the short-term by the DfE, and a likely reduction in the number of secondary places once the decade reaches its midway point.

If the DfE has to find more funds for training more doctors, might it be tempted to bring any reduction in teacher preparation numbers forward to start in this autumn’s announcements for 2022 entry? Higher Education might like the reduction to be in postgraduate provision, but the DfE could make more top line savings by reducing undergraduate primary numbers. However, it seems likely that students not offered places on undergraduate course might still decide to attend university and enter teaching through the postgraduate route.

One consideration should be determining which route provides the applicants that best meet the needs of the sector? For instance, how do the ‘A’ level points scores of undergraduates starting primary teacher preparation courses match the scores of their postgraduate colleagues starting such courses.

The regular annual performance profiles might also offer some indications of the type of courses the DfE would possibly favour if there are reductions in places on offer. However, that will also be determined by the DfE’s priorities in terms of quality and other factors, such as employment outcomes and no doubt the contribution to the ‘levelling up’ agenda.

The takeover by the DfE of the postgraduate recruitment process from UCAS adds another uncertainty into the mix. Will the data be available from the DfE, as it has been from UCAS, and before that the GTTR (Graduate Teacher Training Registry), weekly and then monthly data that allowed seasoned ITT watchers to predict the outcome of the recruitment round as early as February or March of each year?

If it isn’t forthcoming, the answer might be regular monthly FOI requests until civil servants understood the message about the need for transparency in data that is best described to the Office for National Statistics as management information rather than statistics.

Teach First trainees have already started their courses, and many other providers will be gearing up for a start early in September. As ever, I wish the staff and the trainees well, and hope that those embarking on a career as a teacher will enjoy the experience of what can be a wonderful, but at times challenging career. Every bit as good as being a doctor, even if not as well paid.

QTS for life?

Posted on July 7, 2021 by John Howson

Re-reading my submission to the Carter Review https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/a-submission-to-the-carter-review/ from way back in 2014, made me think that the recent Market Review of ITT discussed in the previous two posts on this blog missed another important point. Because it was focused on the delivery mechanism and content of ITT and not the candidates undergoing the training in deciding how to create world class teachers it missed discussing some important issues, such as should QTS last for life and can a world-class profession continue with a QTS award that allows any teacher to teach anything to any pupil with no check. What is the point of a subject knowledge requirement if at the end of a course a PE teacher can be employed to teach science on the basis that they have a sports science degree?

Changing the rules on preparation courses without looking at the ‘downstream’ consequences is a bit like closing the stable door before you have even put the horse inside. What’s the appropriate preparation to teach humanities if it contains elements of history; geography and even religious education? Do you need post ‘A’ level qualifications in each subject area to be able to teach it? As far as I can tell, the Market Review is silent on this type of discussion. Then there are the subjects taught at Key Stages 4 & 5 that are barely recognised in the Teacher Supply Model but where schools actively recruit each year. These subjects include, economics, psychology, sociology and law. Most of these subjects have more posts advertised each year by schools than does Latin, a subject recognised by the DfE in the Teacher Supply Model.

As already alluded to, the issue of moving from training to employment is a discussion that merits more attention that was paid to it in the Review. It is appropriate to assume that the best quality trainees are the first to secure teaching posts: a sensible assumption if the market works properly. Such an outcome would leave the weakest students sometimes without a teaching post for September, but available to fill the vacancies that arise for the following January, often due to maternity leave arrangements. How should the system deal with these teachers-in-waiting? Ignore them as at present? Hope that they will pick up supply work? Ensure every teacher passing the training component is offered a teaching post for September of at least one year in duration?

A Review that talks about world class teachers and deals with initial training and professional development, but ignores the realities of life, won’t easily achieve its aims for the system as a whole. The issue of the length of time a teacher could spend working as a supply teachers was tackled some time ago, but the issue of a gap between completing training and starting teaching in the subject and phase of your training has not really been addressed. I think such an omission is a mistake.

I am sure that the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Teaching Profession and its associated Special Interest Group or SIG will be taking a look at the Review before the summer.

ITT Market Review: more thoughts

Posted on July 6, 2021 by John Howson

Following on from yesterday’s post on this blog. I have been sent NASBTT’s press release about the Market Review. A key paragraph in their response states that:

‘However, we simply cannot support the recommendation that a reaccreditation process is necessary to achieve the recommended adaptations to curriculum design and provision. The report presents no evidence to suggest that existing providers of ITT would be unable to deliver the new curriculum requirements in full. A wide-scale, expensive and disruptive reaccreditation process poses a huge risk to teacher supply. Introducing an unnecessary administrative burden to the sector, which, in turn, presents such clear risks to our teacher supply chain, with no clear rationale for the benefits it will bring, is simply indefensible.’ National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers

I have some sympathy with their view, but I wonder whether academies could just ignore the whole process suggested in the Review document. After all, Michael Gove, when Secretary of State for Education, allowed academies to employ anyone as a teacher regardless of their training.

Of course, for them to do so would relieve the DfE of the cost of any training, because such people employed by schools would not count against the DfE Teacher Supply Model Allocations. However, a wholesale move to school employed trainees would, as NASBTT suggest, bring risks to the supply chain. It might also soak up a lot of the Apprenticeship cash currently being recycled back to HMTreasury by schools that cannot spend the present levy. Such a move would also allow schools to ignore the new 20 days intensive period in schools that seems likely to be very expensive to implement. This is another area where the Review is long on ideas but short on implementation and especially costing.

When the TTA was established in the 1990s, Coopers and Lybrand, as they then were, produced a document about the Funding of Teacher Education. Some years later, I undertook a research project for the Higher Education Funding Council in Wales on the funding of Teacher Education.

Both studies recognised that teaching salaries are often higher than those for university lecturers and thus the use of higher education funding models doesn’t fully deal with the real cost of preparing a teacher. My study in Wales showed that postgraduate courses could rarely cover their costs, but that undergraduate courses might be able to do so with sufficient numbers and with lower transfer payments to primary schools than was expected by secondary schools that tended to be more savvy at that time about the costs of mentors and working with trainees than their primary colleagues.

The Review also seems to pay little attention to the fact that some trainees need more help than others. I provided some case studies in the piece on this blog that I wrote for the Carter Review: another look at teacher education, some seven years ago. https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/a-submission-to-the-carter-review/ is worth a re-read.

I hope someone is undertaking a costing exercise on the Review’s proposals as it will help identify the extent to which they might to use NASBTT’s words about the Review

Be ‘A potentially catastrophic risk to de-stabilising the market.’

ITT Review: prelude to a cull?

Posted on July 5, 2021 by John Howson

The DfE today published the long awaited ITT Market Review Final Report on Initial Teacher Training. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/initial-teacher-training-itt-market-review-report and the associated consultation. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/initial-teacher-training-itt-market-review

This type of exercise comes along about once in every generation. Thirty years ago it was the establishment of the Teacher Training Agency and fifteen years ago, the desire to move towards a Masters Degree profession by the Labour government.

This Review that is unsigned and totally anonymous, is strong in certain areas, but lamentably weak in others. The outstanding changes that may cause issues in my view are not the content of training per se, as governments have taken an active interest in that before, although the section on synthetic phonics only being permitted as the way to teach reading does read a tad dictatorial. To me the fun will be around the Intensive Teaching 20 days, and the lengthening of courses to 38 weeks, especially f this is expected to take place within a funding envelope designed for higher education classroom courses of 30 weeks. Reaction to these changes will be worth watching closely.

Change there has to be. The primary teacher market is facing a period of over-supply resulting from the fall in the birth rate and possible loss of young families back to other EU countries as well as the age profile of the teaching force. A rationale for keeping the good providers allows for reductions in provision on a basis less open to challenge than one with no rationale behind the cuts when they come.

Such a reduction in places is still a couple of years away for secondary teacher providers, but this Review won’t have much effect before the 2024 labour market, by which time secondary schools in some areas will be seeing reductions in their intakes with a knock-on effect on the demand for teachers.

Who will be the winners form this review? It is difficult to assess at this stage, as the age-old question of rewarding good providers versus a sensible national distribution of training places didn’t really receive an airing in the Review except around Teaching School hubs.

Will schools want to take on the burden of longer courses with more intensive mentoring and an associated bureaucracy that will inevitable accompany the required control of content and progress. If not, will MATs see it as their function. Clearly local authorities and diocese aren’t in the running for lead providers as they don’t rate a mention. Curiously, since it has operated a model possibly not a million miles away from what is being advocated, Teach First as a programme is seemingly ignored in the section on employment-based entry routes into teaching.

Overall, the approach seems to me to be a blend of a more centralised curriculum around a delivery structure reminiscent of the Area Training Organisations set up after World War Two.

The good news is that with a rethink about professional development that has withered on the vine for much of this century, other than for government led priorities, there might be a revival of the concept of professional development centres where teacher can come together to learn. Alongside this there ought to be an evaluation of a career structure of the type once provided by local advisory and support services.

In the end, deciding what to do and how to do it that is the meat of this Review is the easy part. Solving the crisis of teacher supply so that every child has a great teacher is a much greater challenge, and one that this Review largely ducked despite its title.

UCAS end of 2020 cycle ITT data

Posted on April 8, 2021 by John Howson

UCAS has today published the end of cycle data for courses that started last autumn. Regular readers that follow this blog will know that much of what is contained in the data has been commented upon in posts on this blog la the August and October.

However, ‘The End of Cycle’ (EoC) report contains much more information than the regular monthly updates published during the cycle. One area is in that of the ethnicity of applicants and the percentages accepted. Why gender is seen as capable of being revealed each month and ethnicity is not is an interesting question. I assume it is down to the fact that numbers in some categories would be too small to make publication viable or appropriate.

Regardless of the reason, the EoC report contains some interesting data.

Accepted percentages 2020 from UCAS PG ITT data
	Male	Female	All
Black	37%	53%	48%
Other	41%	51%	48%
Asian	50%	61%	58%
Not Stated	55%	57%	56%
Mixed [sic]	58%	62%	61%
Total	63%	70%	68%
White	67%	74%	72%

Source: UCAS

Black male applicants had less than a four in ten chance of being accepted on to a course compared with 74% of white females that were accepted. It would be interesting to drill down into these figures to see whether there are regional and subject/phase differences within the categories.

My assumption would be that London courses perform well in terms of acceptance of ethnic minority candidates and those courses in regions furthest from the capital may attract few applicants from ethnic groups other than the White group. This can pose another issue if a few courses receive the bulk of say Black African Male applicants. The policy should be to take the most suitable applicants.

I don’t know how much effort the DfE puts into monitoring these statistics and how they respond to the outcomes? Are civil servants content with the disparity between the different groups or should more work be undertaken to reduce the differences across gender and ethnicity?

Male applicants domiciled in London had one of the lowest acceptance rates overall for me of just 50% of applicants. It would be interesting to cross-tab the domicile by region with ethnicity. By contrast, 86% of women applicants domiciled in the north east appear to have been accepted That seems like a high figure to me and it would be interesting to see how many of these were accepted before say, Christmas. Providers that fill courses quickly can save time and money but such a practice begs the question about whether there should be a closing date for applications to allow more equal chances not determined by how quickly you decide upon teaching as a career.

ITT: not all plain sailing

Posted on March 25, 2021 by John Howson

Normally during a downturn in the economy, and the associated rise in unemployment, teaching does well as a career choice, and applications for places on graduate teacher preparation courses surge; they only peak when the labour market shows signs of picking up again.

The trend during the pandemic of the past year has been slightly different to this pattern. Yes, overall applications, and applicant numbers are up, as commentators that just look at the overall numbers have noted. However, for those more concerned with the details, the picture is more nuanced.

In primary, applications have not yet reached the peak seen in the 2016/17 round, and are some 5,000 or so below that level, and only 8,000 applications above the low point reached in March 2020 before the full extent of the current pandemic had become clear. There may be a warning here about the desirability of becoming a primary school teacher among the group that society has relied upon to ensure an intake of high quality new teachers each year. The public data doesn’t allow for any further comments, but someone should be taking a look at the detailed data.

It is in the secondary sector that the outcome is more nuanced. Three subjects stand out for concern. In biology, overall applications are down on March 2020, by around a thousand, to 2,360. While there will be plenty of chemistry trainees this year, with applications double what they were in March 2020, physics, as a subject, seems unlikely that it will meet its target for the year unless applications pick up in the second half of the year. As a result, any shortfall in biology may leave school struggling for science teachers for September 2022, if demand return to more normal levels next year.

In geography, applications are down by around 300 this year on last, meaning offer levels are not much above the low levels seen seven and eight years ago. However, with ever more history trainees competing for jobs, schools will be able to replace geography teachers with humanities teachers. Whether their quality of subject knowledge will be acceptable is an issue for others to debate.

Design and technology, the ‘ugly duckling’ and neglected child of the school curriculum is a real and serious concern. Applications by mid-March were just 760, compared with 820 at the same point in 2020. That’s application and not applicants. As a result, offer levels are at their lowest point for March for any year in the last decade.

I would content that design and technology is an important subject, and the DfE needs to address where the future stock of teachers is to come from? An urgent look at the details of applicants and why only 190 offers have been made is needed. In reality, this could be a few as 100 actual applicants offered places on design and technology ITT courses by mid-March.

Nearly half of the growth in applicants can be found in the London and South East regions. Whether this means that some rebalancing of ITT places might be required, as these are the two regions with the greatest demand for teachers, is no doubt a matter for active discussion. It would be foolhardy to leave places unfilled in other parts of the country whilst turning away acceptable applicants from London, especially as London often produces a higher percentage of BAME trainees than other parts of England.

Next month the blog will consider the different routes into teaching, and how they are faring and also revisit the issue of the age profile of applicants.

John Howson

Education and the numbers that affect what happens

Tag Archives: ITT providers