Tag Archives: ITT providers

More good news: but not for all

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Regular readers of this blog will know that the last Thursday of the month is the day that UCAS provides updated details of applications to postgraduate teacher preparation courses managed through their system. The numbers for February mark the half way point in the cycle between course commencements and thus represents a good time to make a judgement on what is happening in the marketplace for trainee teachers.

It is not surprising that with the economy facing the challenges resulting from the covid-19 pandemic that teaching appears a more interesting profession to pursue for graduates than when unemployment is low, and the economy is booming. However, there are not similar outcomes across the whole gamut of subjects.

This blog has used as a measure the number of applications classified as falling into one of three categories ‘Placed’, ‘Conditional Place’ or ‘Holding offer’. This is a more refined measure than using the gross total of applications, not least because each candidate can make several applications.

The news this month is that the numbers in these three categories are generally well above those for February in recent years. However, there are some exceptions to this general observation.

In geography, biology and design and technology numbers in these categories are below the same level seen last year.  Geography suffered from over-recruitment a couple of years ago, and numbers placed and holding offers have been controlled more carefully since then.

Now applications for places in biology and physics courses are on the increase, there is less incentive to recruit large numbers of biology trainees, so caution here is understandable. Design and Technology is a subject that regularly struggles to fill places, and the current nature of the pandemic may not have produced large numbers of potential teachers in this subject area.

Although applicant numbers are increasing, there has not really been a surge. Compared with February 2020, there are some 4,300 more applicants this year. These additional applicants are spread across the country, although 1,100 are domiciled in London and a further 1,200 in the South East, leaving the remainder to be spread across the remaining regions.

Applications are up from those in all age-groups, including both career changers and new graduates, producing little shift in the percentage composition of applicants by age-group compared with last year.

The inclusion of a gender category of ‘unknown or Prefer not to say’ makes annual comparison on this factor impossible, but it seems likely that there has been little change and perhaps that men have even lost a little ground on women in percentage terms.

In terms of routes into teaching, School Direct (Salaried) remains the big loser in the number of applications, especially in the primary sector. All other routes seem to have benefited, although the rate of offering places on the Apprenticeship route seems to be slow when compared to other routes. In view of the government’s plans for teachers, the higher education sector remains resilient, and is still the choice for more applications than any other route into teaching.

As places fill, we can expect applications to reduce. However, of more interest is how the wider graduate labour market will recover from the pandemic and what effect that recovery will have on applications to teacher preparation courses.

Teacher Education and Professional Development

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Teacher Education and Professional Development

By John Howson

This first appeared in 2014 as a chapter in 21st century Education: A Social Liberal Approach

Edited by Helen Flynn and published by the social Liberal Forum

In view of the DfE’s announcement yesterday about an Institute of Teaching I thought it was worth dusting it down and reminding myself what I wrote all those years ago.

Summary

Qualified Teacher Status should be restricted in the subjects and phases where teachers are allowed to practice.

Teacher Training, and especially training for primary teachers, needs a radical overhaul. All teachers should be expected to study to a Masters level.

A College of Teachers should be established to allow a professional voice for teachers.

All teachers should have access to funds for professional development, and the College of Teachers should help devise suitable programmes to meet the needs of all teachers.

Keep in touch and re-training opportunities for those taking time out of the classroom should be established to help those wishing to return after a career break to do so without any loss of expertise or seniority.

Teacher should be a reserved occupational title only allowed to be used by those with current Qualified Teacher Status.

Introduction

Liberal Democrats won’t achieve anything in education without the help of those who work in our schools. There are two key challenges facing schools during the next parliament that no government can duck: coping with the largest increase in the primary school population since the 1970s, and ensuring that the first increase in the learning leaving age for more than 40 years brings positive benefits to students, communities and the wider economy.

How we deal with these demands whilst ensuring a more representative and less divisive schooling system will reflect our ability as a Party to translate our values into actions. Nowhere will this be clearer than in the fields of teacher education and professional development. In this section I propose new arrangements for initial teacher preparation programmes; a discussion about arrangements for the transfer from trainee to employment; and a programme of staff development that recognises the need for self-renewal and development throughout the working life of a teacher.

Teacher Education

It is worth recalling that schooling alone, even without the further and higher education sectors, is a large-scale enterprise in England. Currently about 40,000 people are on different types of courses to become a teacher: about 6,000 are undergraduates, and the remainder graduates. Overall, these trainees represent more than a third of the current size of the British land army before its recent downsizing. Overall, there are probably around half a million teachers working in state and private schools across England in any one year. Most make teaching their career for life, if they last beyond their first five years in the profession, and, despite the frequent talk of ‘many careers in a lifetime’, most start teaching as their first career.

Government policy for the teaching profession was set by the coalition in the 2010 White Paper, ‘The Importance of Teaching’. It is not clear what, if any input Liberal Democrats played in this White Paper that followed hard on the heels of the 2010 Academies Act, but it marked a determination to shift training away from higher education and into schools. A detailed analysis suggests that the model proposed was very secondary school centred, with little thought for the needs of teachers seeking to train for the primary school sector. The House of Commons Select Committee on Education in reviewing teacher education said that Partnership between schools and universities is likely to provide the highest-quality initial teacher education, the content of which will involve significant school experience but include theoretical and research elements as well as in the best systems internationally and in much provision here. That view seems to have cut little ice with the coalition government.

Too often ignored in this debate are the training needs of those seeking to enter the teaching profession. Teacher preparation programmes will only be fit for purpose if they successfully turn those who start such courses into successful teachers. Starting with the needs of trainees rather than schools or higher education should be the key to a successful training programme.

To be a successful teacher requires a range of different qualities but, at least in the secondary sector, there ought to be a minimum level of subject knowledge equivalent to two years of an honours degree. Anyone without this basic level of knowledge should be offered Subject knowledge Enhancement courses to allow them to acquire sufficient knowledge. Even those with the requite degree may still lack expertise in areas of the school curriculum in their subject and ways should be found to allow them to continue to acquire such additional knowledge. This programme would allow for Qualified Teacher Status to be restricted to specific subjects and phases rather than continue to be generic as at present where a teacher with QTS can teach anything to anyone at any level of schooling. The fact that more than 20% of those teaching some Mathematics in our schools do not have a qualification above ‘A’ level in the subject may explain why many children neither enjoy the subject nor do well in it.

Qualified Teacher Status should be restricted in the subjects and phases where teachers are allowed to practice.

However, it is in preparing teachers for the primary sector that most attention needs to be paid. The present post-graduate course attempts to cram the equivalent of a quart into a pint pot. Many curriculum areas receive scant attention, and there is no guarantee that the time in school will effectively dovetail in developing the time spent on the programmes outside the classroom. It is time for a thorough overhaul of how primary teachers are prepared. In the first instance, the undergraduate training route should be replaced by a wider first degree programme that would prepare graduates to work in a wider range of services including youth and social work as well as teaching. The specific training to be a teacher would be entirely postgraduate. Such a new degree would prevent undue early specialisation among those entering university straight from school.  It would also avoid the bizarre situation created by the coalition whereby graduates wanting to become a teacher are subject to a minimum degree standard, but no such standard is imposed on undergraduates. As with the secondary sector, where there are already virtually no undergraduate teacher preparation courses, graduates of the new courses would not be licensed to teach at any level in the primary school, but would be certified to teach at a particular Key Stage.

Overall, graduate training would be on a two year model leading to a Masters degree with the possibility of appropriate credit against the subject components of secondary subject training for those with appropriate honours degrees.

Teacher Training, and especially training for primary teachers, needs a radical overhaul. All teachers should be expected to study to a Masters level.

The partnership model for teacher preparation that developed during the 1990s has generally served the profession well, with Ofsted recognising that teachers are better prepared than in the past. However, if we are going to maintain national standards for teaching, it is imperative that there is a body that can offer support and guidance in this area and oversee standards independent of government. The unfortunate abolition of the General Teaching Council in England was a short-sighted and politically inspired move. The creation of a new College of Teachers with oversight of the profession and responsibility for determining standards of entry to the profession is an urgent requirement. Such a body should be independent of, but accountable to, government. It should have a strong research ethos and assist in bringing together the best practice in teacher preparation from around the world as well as working to develop such practice in this country. Not only could the College provide professional status for teachers but it would also provide a centre for determining effective career development in a manner that the present National College has seemed unable to do effectively outside of its original remit of leadership development.

Professional Development

A College of Teachers should be established to allow a professional voice for teachers.

A lack of coherent professional development has been one of the key shortcomings of the present management of the teaching profession. Although the pressures created by the addition of extra pupils will make it difficult to fund a comprehensive programme of professional development during the next decade there should be funding for a number of hours of personal development each year. The present five days allocated for school-funded training should be used for development related to the needs of the school, and should be linked to the use of accredited trainers. Teachers in their first year of employment should be mentored and provided with a reduced timetable, as at present. In addition, provision should be made for the professional development of those either not currently employed but seeking work as a teacher or employed on temporary contracts. These groups should be offered five days paid training a year including travelling expenses.

In addition to the five in-school training days, teachers as professionals should be expected to undertake other forms of professional development. The College of Teachers should be responsible for research and development of the best practice in on-line learning building upon the experience gained with the TeachersTV experiment and current developments within both the higher education and the private sector. For teachers with more than five years’ experience, the State should be prepared to fund part-time Masters’ degrees in pedagogy. In addition, funding should be available for middle leadership training to meet the needs of schools.

All teachers should recognise the changes that technology has wrought on society over the past four decades and that methods of learning for all are not immune to such developments. Whether it is the infant with the ‘tablet’ they already think they know how to use when they arrive at school or the sixth former studying an open access course at Harvard alongside their ‘A’ levels, the notion of the role of the teacher is already being challenged. Elsewhere in this book the view of teachers as ‘facilitators’ of learning, partially, but not entirely, a secondary inspired notion, must cause everyone to reflect about how teachers are prepared for the learning environment, and the need for those teachers already in the profession to constantly challenge their thinking about teaching and learning.  We need a profession that is supported to be open and questioning about how to educate the next generation as well as constantly reflecting upon their practice in the classroom.

All teachers should have access to funds for professional development, and the College of Teachers should help devise suitable programmes to meet the needs of all teachers.

Children with special educational needs should have access to the very best learning that the teaching profession can offer. All too often at present that is not the case, and such schools often have higher vacancy rates and less well-qualified staff than schools in general. A funded programme of training for teachers that want to work with such pupils should be widely available, and managed on a regional basis. This programme would include provision of SENCO training and oversight of the provision of Educational Psychologists. It would also cover training for support for those working in Virtual Schools and learning centres.

After a number of years of teaching some classroom teachers wish to specialise in other areas such as guidance, both pastoral and career orientated, or in the wider role of a counsellor. Others teachers may wish to pass their knowledge on to the next generation of teachers as advisory teachers, advisers, or helping with the preparation of the next generation of teachers. Career opportunities are haphazard, and training for such positions unclear. The government should work with the College of Teachers to develop a career route for this important group of future leaders of the profession. Teachers can certainly play a more important part in the assessment of their pupils. The College of Teachers could work to create chartered assessors with the responsibility for more internal assessment and less dependence of the marking of outside markers whose judgements are constantly being challenged. If a new lecturer at a university can mark the critical paper in a the degree examinations of a final year student we ought to be able to trust a competent and trained teacher to achieve the same degree of integrity and objectiveness with their pupil’s work. Moderation would remain necessary, but the qualification of a chartered teacher assessor should be one that every classroom teacher should aspire to achieve. As a by-product it might reduce the cost of external examinations or even do away with the need for such an expensive system at sixteen now that the education participation age has been raised to Eighteen.

In a profession where two thirds of the teachers are female and half the profession is below the age of thirty-five, it is likely that a significant number of teachers will, at any point in time, either be on maternity leave or taking a career break. This group represent a valuable resource for our schools. However, their professional development is often neglected during their time away from teaching. It would seem a sensible investment to offer both ‘keep in touch’ arrangements, and the opportunity for formal professional development during any sustained period away from the classroom. One result of this might be that QTS, which is currently held for life once granted except in very limited circumstances, would only be retained on participation in approved professional development. Once relinquished QTS would only be regained following a period of certified re-training offered by a training provider.

Keep in touch and re-training opportunities for those taking time out of the classroom should be established to help those wishing to return after a career break to do so without any loss of expertise or seniority.

One major problem with the present system of training and employment is that apart from those training through School Direct Salaried scheme, and on Teach First, teachers are not guaranteed a job after qualification. This lack of a guarantee of work might not have been of concern when the State funded teacher preparation courses, but now that those not guaranteed jobs are required to fund their training through the payment of tuition fees of up to £9,000, and in some cases receive no bursary support, this may prove to be a disincentive to train as a teacher, especially in a buoyant economy. It is time to look at alternative arrangements that allow either a salary for all during training, as in many other graduate training programmes, or the repayment of fees for those who remain in teaching for more than a set period of time. While the latter option might seem the more appealing to the Treasury, it could well fall foul of equal opportunities legislation. The saving from not needing to train more teachers than required might well make the funding of a salaried scheme affordable, especially if the undergraduate route was abolished at the same time. Any shortfall in training numbers can be filled through returners and those entering teaching with overseas qualifications or from another sector such as further education.

There are many other workers employed in schools these days. Their need for training and professional development should not be overlooked. Indeed, although many possess professional and administrative skills in their own right, it is important for them to understand the context within which they work. Whether as ‘learning assistants’; clerical or administrative staff; or in other roles; they should be offered the opportunity for regular professional development. Indeed, some, especially learning assistants, may wish to eventually progress to become qualified teachers. The opportunity to progress in this manner should be an essential part of a professional development framework.

The challenge for any government is to provide a coherent framework for those seeking to enter the profession as well as for serving teachers within a rapidly changing environment of the governance of education. I reject the view that teachers can be recruited with the need for no training at all. Indeed, the term ‘teacher’ should become a protected professional term, and only be allowed for those with Qualified Teacher Status. There are plenty of other terms such as instructor, tutor, lecturer, mentor and even preceptor that can be used to help parents and pupils distinguish the status of those responsible for the education process. The choice for schools and their promoters would then be whether to remain independent or to accept the standards of teacher preparation required for funding set down by the State. It may well be that some of the present ‘free schools’ funded by the State might not accept the need for training. Particular issues arise where the schools, such as those following the Montessori methods wish to receive state funding. With QTS more narrowly defined than at present, it should be possible to create certification that allows for such possibilities.

In a society where schooling by the State is not mandatory but the default option a significant private sector has continued to flourish for a variety of reasons: indeed, it now represent a significant generator of foreign income for the country as well as often being a socially divisive factor in society, although the ability of parents of children at state funded schools to but private tuition shows that it is as much a matter of the gap between the richest and poorest in society as it is the structure of the school system. Nevertheless, private schools often recruit teachers trained at the public expense, just as consultants in the Health Service undertaking private work use knowledge gained from training and experience funded by the State. The move to schools working with trainees and then employing them at the end of their training as exemplified by Teach First and School Direct might help to reduce the direct cost to Society of training teachers for the private sector, but is unlikely ever to eradicate the practice. What is critical is to ensure that there are sufficient teachers to satisfy the overall demand as, when there has been a shortage, the private sector has the ability to buy the teachers it needs in a manner that publicly funded schools do not.   

Teacher should be a reserved occupational title only allowed to be used by those with current Qualified Teacher Status.

It is acknowledged that an educated society brings social, cultural, and economic benefits to a country. As a result, the development of the workforce in schools, and especially of the teachers, is something that cannot be ignored by a government. Like any good employer of a business with multiple worksites, standards of training need to be created across the system both to ensure good practice and to allow for the interchange of staff between different locations, not least when, for whatever reason, a workplace unexpectedly experiences difficulties. This does not require the government to conduct the training. At present, a partnership between schools and higher education offers the most effective solution for national coverage, especially while the framework for the governance of schooling is so disjoined, particularly in the vital primary sector of schooling. However, the SCITT model has shown that leadership of the partnership can work with either partner in control. What is important is awareness that training programmes should be tailored to the needs of those undertaking them with a view to a qualification that meets the needs of the schools and promotes the desire for continued professional development.

Not all those who seek to become teachers may be suitable. But, for those who do, we need to offer high quality training, effective transfer into employment, and the opportunity for professional development that will help create and sustain a world-class education system.

Employment based routes hit new lows

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In a year when recruitment to teacher preparation courses was on the increase, any aim the government might have had to increase the share of school-based preparation courses has stalled. The government issued the annual census of trainees on teacher preparation courses today.https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/initial-teacher-training-trainee-number-census-2020-to-2021

I am not a great fan of the new way of presenting statistics, and especially of the challenges it present when trying to create specific tables. However that aside, the key points are that as expected: trainee numbers are up, but that not all subjects met the Teacher Supply Model number for the year. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised by that fact as I had predicted that would be the case, despite the increase in applications in the March to September period.

Higher Education, no doubt helped by the offer of both undergraduate and postgraduate places, increased its share of the market from 38% to 41%. Still way off its former levels, but no longer on a downward trend. School Direct Salaried route, the classic employment based route, was the big faller; down from 7% to 5% this year. Teach First took 4% against 5% last year. SCITTs held steady at 12% as did the Fee-based School Direct route at 23% of the total.

Some tables produced today by the DfE may include the small number of trainees forecast to join courses after the census date, but the differences are small.

Future blogs will explore the data in more details, but arts and humanities, and some subjects that have recruited poorly in recent years, have done well, even if in the case of Design and Technology and Physics and Chemistry, mathematics and Modern Languages they still did not meet the Teacher Supply Model number for the year.

The increase in Physics from 42% to 45% of the TSM number was especially disappointing, but not surprising.

Of more concern to those on courses and HM Treasury must be the over-recruitment in history –up from 115% to 175% of target and Physical Education, up from 105% to 135%. In these subjects, all trainees will struggle to find teaching posts in England in 2021 and it would be ironic if the government is funding teacher preparation for teachers forced to work overseas to practice their professional skills due to a lack of teaching posts in England.

Primary courses also over-recruited to target, and some may struggle in some parts of the country to find teaching posts for September or at the end of undergraduate courses if the decline in school rolls continues.

Little or Large?

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The DfE is once again showing signs of wanting to progress its review of the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) market, first announced nearly two years ago as a part of a Recruitment and Retention Strategy, if an article in SchoolsWeek is to be believed. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-to-reboot-itt-market-review-to-slim-down-sector/.

Does it make sense to slim down the teacher preparation market sector to a smaller number of providers? Well, certainly, those providers that shut up shop at the end of June and leave the heavy lifting of recruitment over the summer to others might be considered as not fully participating in ensuring that all places on teacher preparation courses are filled.

With the DfE aiming to take over the application process, it may also make sense to have to interact with fewer larger providers in order to more easily manage the market.

On the other hand, as NASBITT has pointed out, the ITT sector is performing exceptionally well. Ofsted inspections have 99% of providers rated good or better. On this basis, it seems odd that any DfE officials should think too much provision is of poor quality, especially without providing the evidence for that judgement.

As NASBTT makes clear, smaller SCITT providers very often serve a very specific need in recruitment cold-spots and rural/coastal communities. Often, in the past, larger central providers did not manage to service the needs of schools in these areas, which is often why the smaller providers emerged in the first place in order to to fill the gap.

Smaller local providers can also meet the needs of career switchers that are unwilling to move long distances to undertake their course to become a teacher. This was, after all, the thinking behind the School Direct Salaried Scheme and its predecessor Employment-based routes of the past thirty years.

Large providers in the wrong place don’t meet the needs of the market and the DfE has always wrestled with the need for both quality provision and the recruitment of around 35,000 trainees each year that are willing to train to meet the needs of all schools.

Perhaps, any review might focus on those schools that find recruiting NQTs a challenge and explore how within a market system of recruitment, schools can recruit their fair share of NQTs?

A compromise might be for the DfE to engage with a few larger providers – perhaps NASBTT could even be one of them and UCET another – and these wholesalers of places would then handle the smaller units actually undertaking the training. There are some examples of national providers in the past, of which The Open University was perhaps the most well-known. Indeed, might this be an opportune moment for that University to reconsider returning to providing initial teacher preparation courses across England?

What the DfE must not do is undermine recruitment to the profession at this extremely sensitive moment in time. The ITT core content framework has only just been rolled out, as have the expectations under the new ITE inspection framework. As NASBTT point out, providers need time to embed and consolidate this before any further changes are thrust upon them. If it isn’t broke, be careful about how you fix it.

Teaching School Hubs

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If you are involved .din bidding to become a Teaching School Hub and require data about the local teacher labour market over the past three years do make contact.

Teachvac, where I am the Chair of the board, has extensive data covering up to 30 secondary subjects and the primary sector for main scale; posts with TLRs and leadership scale vacancies. Data for 2018-2020 available on request at local authority level.

email enquiries@oxteachserv.com or contact me personally on dataforeducation@gmail.com

Teacher Shortage over: well almost

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The latest data from UCA about postgraduate ITT numbers for September provides a first view of what the outlook for the year is likely to be. The September data will provide the basis for the likely supply of teachers into the labour market for September 2021 and January 2022 vacancies.

In view of the shock to the economy administered by the covid-19 pandemic, it is not surprising that there were nearly 7,000 more applicants in 2020 than in 2019. Up from 40,560 to 47,260 for those in domiciled in England. The number placed or ‘conditionally placed’ increased from 28,500 to 33,800. This is an increase of around 20% on last year.

The number of applicants placed increased across the country, although in the East of England the increase of only 120 was smaller than in the other regions. In London, the increase was in the order of an extra 1,000 trainees placed on courses compared with 2019.

More applicants from all age groups were placed this year, although the increase was smaller among the youngest age group of new graduates. This might be a matter for concern. Over, 2,000 more men were placed this year, compared to 4,500 more women. This is proportionally a greater increase in the number of men placed.

There was much more interest in secondary courses, where applications increased by nearly 14,000 to more than 81,000. For primary courses, the increase was near 6,000 to just over 53,000. The difference may be down to the date the pandemic struck home, and the availability of courses with places still available at that point in the cycle. Many primary courses will already have been full by March.

Higher education seems to have been the main beneficiary of the wave of additional applications. Applications to high education courses increased from 55,000 last year to nearly 65,000 this year. Applications for apprenticeships reached nearly 1,600 and there were 1,800 more applications to SCITT courses. The School Direct fee route attracted nearly 6,500 more applications. However, the School Direct Salaried route only attracted 200 more applicants this year, and the number placed actually fell this year, by around 300 to just 1,470. Does this route have a future?

In most secondary subjects, more applications are recorded as placed this year than last. Geography, languages (where classifications have changed) are the key exceptions, with fewer recorded as placed than last year. Even in physics, there has been a small increase on last year. However, the increase in design and technology is not enough to ensure the DfE’s Teacher Supply Model (TSM) number will be reached. This is also likely to be the case in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Fortunately, in the sciences, there are far more biology students than required by the TSM number.

I am also sceptical as to whether all the history and physical education trainees will find teaching posts in their subjects next year, because the excess of students placed to the TSM number is such that it is difficult to see sufficient vacancies been generated even in  a normal year. If fewer teachers laves than normal, then the excess may be significant and these trainees might well want to look to any possible second subjects they could teach.

At this point in time, it looks as if 20202/21 round will start with a significant increase in applications over the numbers at the start of the last few years: we shall see.

Still not enough trainees

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By Monday 17th August some 45,210 people had applied for postgraduate teacher preparation courses through the UCAS Scheme. This was an increase of 6,000 on the number recorded in August 2019, for these courses in England. This represent a 15% year on year increase. However the number is still well below the record levels of more than 60,000 witnessed during the previous recession caused by the banking crisis. No doubt, this is in part due to the fact that it wasn’t until March that the world was turned upon its head.

The 2020/21 recruitment round may well see much high numbers of applicants right from the start of the cycle later this autumn. There are also Teach First numbers to be taken into account, although they don’t publish regular figures on total applicant numbers.

Every region of England witnessed increases in applicant numbers over 2019, with more than 1,000 additional applicants in the South East, and 1,500 in London: good news for both regions. There were also more applicants from all age-groups, as well as from both women and men.

As many of these new applicants have arrived relatively late in the recruitment round, and while schools and universities have been enduring ‘lockdown’, it is, perhaps, not surprising that ‘conditional placed’ numbers are up on last year, whereas, in some cases, ‘placed’ numbers are down.

For instance, for men in the age 21 and under category, there were 340 placed this August compared with 400 in August 2019. However the conditional placed number this year was 760, compared with 530 in August 2019. The number of applicants in this age group increased from 1,300 in August 2019 to 1,450 this August. While four of the seven age-groupings for men recorded fewer placed numbers than last year, only two age groups, the youngest and oldest groupings, for women recorded placed numbers below last year. This may give credence to the suggestion that male applicants for teaching tend to apply later on average than women.

School Direct seems to have suffered this year, with fewer placed applicants for both primary and secondary courses, and quite markedly fewer for School Direct Salaried places. This year only 610 applicants have been recorded as placed against 890 last year. Conditional placed numbers for School Direct Salaried this year are 1,550, compared with 1,710 in August last year. No doubt funding arrangements and school closures have affected this route more than some others.

Some subjects have seen significant increases in the number of applications. Art and design has increased to 3,570 this August compared with 1,890 in August 2019. Business studies, a shortage subject, now has 1,720 applications compared with 770 in 2019. By contrast, geography only has 3,740 applications this year compared with 4,380 last year at this point in time.

Mathematics has seen an increase from 8,600 to 11,000 applications, but only 770 of these are placed and with just 1,750 holding a conditional place it seems less than likely that the Teacher Supply Model number will be reached. The same is true for physics, where applications are up from 2,220 to 2,450, but only 550 are recorded as either placed or conditionally placed: not sufficient to meet the requirement.

So, 2020 looks like being better than recent years, but not yet a great year. Hopefully, the 2020/21 round will see all places filled. Since secondary pupil numbers will still be on the increase, this will be important to ensure adequate staffing for our schools.

Initial surge, but no follow through?

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Yesterday, the DfE announced that

New teachers are set to receive a boost to their training and development amid a surge in applications to join the classroom since the outbreak of coronavirus.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/extra-support-for-new-teachers-amid-surge-in-applications

While others will comment upon the first part of the announcement, it is interesting to note that the data released by UCAS today is not as straightforward as the DfE announcement would suggest.

Firstly, much of the surge in applications came between April and May, and was not continued into June. Now this may well be because there were fewer courses left to apply to by early June, as many had closed their doors. Thus, the total increase in applicants over June last year in the order of 2,500 or less than 10%. Of these, the majority of new applicants would seem to be for secondary subjects rather than in the primary sector. The basis for this statement is an interpretation of applications data and, if true, would be helpful.

The second thing to note is that not all secondary subjects have benefited to the same degree. Arts subjects, have seemingly seen lots more offers to applicants, but both physics and design and technology seem unlikely to meet the Teacher Supply Model number unless there are many more applicants over the next two months. The same is true for modern languages. The arts subjects also have more applications in the pipeline, so offers may rise further over the next month or so.

Not surprisingly, the increase in applicants have mainly come from career changers. New graduates don’t yet seem to have switched to teaching in a big way. Thus, applicants aged 22 or under have increased by just over 500 on a base number of over 9,000 whereas there are 550 more applicants in the 25-29 age bracket. This looks especially true for male applicants, where numbers of those 21 and under have increased by around 50 applicants, but the 25-29 age-group has increased by nearly 200 applicants.

Traditional routes into teaching seem to have benefitted the most. There are new additional applications for either apprenticeships or for School Direct Salaried routes with fewer applications for the latter route in the primary sector than in June last year and barely 100 more in the secondary sector. Higher education has attracted 3,000 more applications for secondary courses compared with June last year and now attracts not far from half or all applications for secondary courses.  

It is not clear whether the furlough scheme has helped restrain possible applicants to teaching from applying in large numbers while they discover what will happen once the support scheme comes to an end. If there is mass unemployment then the opening months of the 2020/2021 recruitment round should witness some very large numbers. Later in the summer we will review what happened in the period 2008-201, last time applications grew rapidly.

Not the APPG June 2020 paper

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Not the APPG Teaching Profession June 2020

The Labour Market for Teachers – some observations for the informal meeting 15th June 2020

When I last prepared a piece for the January meeting of the APPG, I thought 2020 would be a challenging year for some teachers looking for posts in the primary sector, but many teachers seeking a post in a secondary school would have more choice.

The rest of January and February saw more vacancies in the secondary sector than in any recent year, but similar vacancy levels in the primary sector to the past two years, although leadership positions remained weaker than in recent times.

And then came the coronavirus; lockdown, and schools talking only vulnerable pupils and those of of key workers; and not many of those. Vacancies slumped. By the end of May, the number of recorded vacancies across both primary and secondary sectors was almost half the number recorded in the same period in 2019. So far, June, usually a month when vacancies start declining towards their August lows, hasn’t shown any upturn in vacancies. As a result, 2020 is on track to look similar to 2019 for the secondary sector overall, whereas the primary sector will almost certainly record fewer opportunities for jobseekers than in 2019, unless there is a big upturn in the autumn in vacancy levels.

This begs two questions are now: how does the sector respond to a very different environment, where jobs are scarce, but applicants more plentiful? Secondly, how will this situation affect school spending patterns?

The APPG might like to establish an independent review of the recruitment market and what constitutes value for money in this new environment. As the Chair of TeachVac, I would be happy to provide evidence to such an inquiry.

TeachVac is now offering webinars about job hunting skills as a service to teachers, as are others. This recognises the balance in the market has shifted, at least for the next recruitment round and probably beyond September 2021.

NfER have provided their own recent assessment https://www.nfer.ac.uk/teacher-labour-market-in-england-annual-report-2020/ but as they note this was written before the recent change in the labour market post March. The TES, SchoolsWeek, and other publications have also commented on what is happening, based on evidence from various sources including TeacherTapp https://teachertapp.co.uk/

The loss in vacancies across the secondary sector was in the order of 5,000 between March and end of May compared with 2019. In the primary sector, it was nearer 2,500. What cannot be computed is the level of interest in teaching from ‘returners’ either made redundant or furloughed. Then there is the effects on the supply market and home tutoring to consider. An independent review by the APPG could consider the whole market and how it has changed. Such a Review could also look at what is happening to interest in teaching as a career. Is the fact the ONS classify teaching as a high contact activity putting off would-be teachers? Early evidence suggests not in terms of applications to become a primary school teacher.

For graphs place a comment or visit my page on LinkedIn search John Howson TeachVac

Dramatic jump in ITT numbers offered places

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There has been unprecedented increases in the number of applicants accepted for places on postgraduate ITT courses in the month between Mid-April and Mid-May. Mostly, these offers were to applicants already in the system. The number of applicants domiciled in England was just over 30,600 by Mid-May 2020, compared with nearly 29,400 in May 2019. This meant that there were some 4,000 new applicants since mid-April, a not dissimilar increase to that seen during the same period in 2019.

The increase in applicants covers all of the reported age groups, with the smallest increase from those aged Twenty Two at the time of application. Proportionally more male applicants than female applicants were recorded during the past month, taking the number of male applicants to over 10,000 for the first time in this recruitment cycle.

However, it is the dramatic increase in numbers of applications shown as ‘placed’; ‘conditionally place’ or ‘holding an offer’ that is the real story this month. Especially, it is the surge in the numbers ‘placed’ in many subjects compared with last month that is most interesting. Of course, applicants can make a number of applications, and be offered places by each, so we need to allow some time to pass while applicants decide which provider’s course they really want to attend where they have had multiple offers.

These figures are not yet enough, by themselves, to solve all the teacher supply problems, since acceptances in some key shortage subjects have yet to reach the level required to be certain that the Teacher Supply Model number will be met. However, the super-tanker that is teacher supply looks as if it is changing course as a result of the pandemic. Next month, and the behaviour of the new crop of graduates, will provide more evidence of the view of teaching, as either a safe haven in an economic crisis or a risky profession best avoided.

Interestingly, there has been a drop in the number of applications to providers in the North East of some 300 compared with May 2019, whereas in London there have been nearly 1,500 more applications that at Mid-May 2019.

In the primary school sector, School Direct Fee courses and PG Teaching Apprenticeships seem to have been the main beneficiaries of applications, whereas School Direct Salaried applications are some 600 below this point last year. Perhaps these applicants have been switched onto Apprenticeship Courses as a more cost effective option to schools.

The pattern in the secondary sector is similar, with School Direct Fee courses gaining around 1,000 additional applications compared with the same month in 2019.  By contrast, the School Direct Salaried route had almost exactly the same number of applications, but fewer offers than by May 2019. Of course, applicants at this time of year must apply where there are places still available and that may affect the balance of applications between types of provider and across different subjects.

With the teacher job market collapsing during May, it isn’t clear what the future holds for teachers and trainees. Much to be done over the next few months and I hope there are the people with the necessary skills to tackle the issues.