Tag Archives: jobs for teachers

Why TeachVac is important

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Earlier this month I posted about the ITT Census of trainees published by the DfE. I noted in one post that it was necessary to remove from the ITT census those trainees not likely to be looking for a teaching post because they are already in a school on salaried schemes.

From the reduced total also needs to be removed a percentage for in-course wastage and a desire by some teachers to work outside of the state school system in either private schools or Sixth Form/further education colleges.

What is left is the free pool that might look for a teaching post anywhere.

SubjectOpen Market
Mathematics1,467
Physical Education1,295
English1,214
History950
Chemistry644
Modern Languages600
Geography523
Biology495
Art & Design440
Other387
Design & Technology372
Physics366
Computing304
Drama304
Religious Education249
Music228
Business Studies164
Classics52
Total secondary10,054

From the list it seems clear that there are unlikely to be enough new entrants to satisfy the demand for teachers by schools in 2023 unless there is a substantial pay rise for teachers or other demands upon funding dampen demand below the level seen in 2022. To some extent demand will be affected by the actions of teachers already in the workforce. Early retirement, plus income from tutoring and some ‘supply’ teacher work might look attractive to some teachers in the latter stages of their career and with enough pension rights to feel confident about leaving full time teaching.

At TeachVac www.teachvac. We help match teachers to vacancies that meet their needs. Price at just £500 per year for secondary schools and just £75 for primary schools TeachVac has made 2 million matches in 2022 from over 100,000 vacancies listed and our pool of teacher sis growing rapidly at the present time as teachers start to think about where and what they want to teach in September.

Schools signing up to TeachVac now, won’t be invoiced until February and thus need not pay until early March. By then, they may well have already received more than 500 matches that covers the annual fee making all further matches effectively cost free.

Dear Prime Minister

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Would you like some good news? On your return from Birmingham, you will no doubt be asking Ministers how their departments can save money. Here is one suggestion. I am not unbiased in making this suggestion, as it could benefit TeachVac, the job board that I chair. However, TeachVac was in existence before the DfE started its own version and has consistently shown how to achieve a low-cost approach to vacancy listing as our accounts at Companies House will confirm. Reviewing the DfE site could also save the government money.

We suggested originally that the DfE need only provide a page pointing those seeking teaching posts to available sites in the private sector, and another for schools showing the relative costs of using different sites. However, in response to the Public Accounts Committee, the DfE decided on a more costly intervention and created its own job board.

TeachVac is currently offering secondary schools a deal of 12 months of unlimited matches for just £250 and a mere £50 for primary schools. How much per vacancy does the DfE cost to provide?

Reproduced below is a post from 2020 that further makes the case for saving money on the DfE’s job board. Our monitoring since then suggests that the DfE site has gained little traction in the market and may be losing ground in terms of teaching vacancies uploaded.

DfE and Teacher Vacancies: Part Two

Posted on April 3, 2021

The DfE is spending more money supporting their latest venture into the teacher recruitment market. SchoolsWeek has uncovered the latest moves by the government to challenge existing players in this market https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-leans-on-mats-to-boost-teacher-job-vacancies-website-take-up/ in an exclusive report.

The current DfE foray into the recruitment market follows the failure of the Fast Track Scheme of two decades ago and the Schools Recruitment Service that fizzled out a decade ago. The present attempt also came on the heels of the fiasco around a scheme to offer jobs in challenging schools in the north of England that never progressed beyond the trial phase.

The present DfE site rolled out nationally two years ago this month. How successful it has been was the subject of a SchoolsWeek article earlier this year. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfes-teacher-job-website-carries-only-half-of-available-positions/  This blog reviewed the market for vacancy sites for teachers last December, in a post entitled Teacher Vacancy Platforms: Pros and Cons that was posted on December 7, 2020.

In that December post, I looked at the three key sites for teacher vacancies in England. TeachVac; the DfE Vacancy site and the TES. As I pointed out, this was not an unbiased look, because I am Chair of the company that owns TeachVac. Indeed, I said, it might be regarded as an advertisement, and warned readers to treat it in that way.

There is an issue with how much schools spend on recruitment of teachers. After all, that was why TeachVac was established eight years ago. The DfE put the figure in their evidence to the STRB this year at around £75 million; a not insubstantial figure.

Will TeachVac be squeezed out in a war between the DfE backed by unlimited government funding and the TES with a big American backer? At the rate TeachVac is currently adding new users, I don’t think so. After all, the DfE site doesn’t cover independent schools, and in the present market I believe that most teachers want a site that allows access to all teaching jobs and not just some. That benefits both TeachVac and the TES as well as other players in the market, such as The Guardian and SchoolsWeek, as well as recruitment agencies.

How much the DfE will need to spend on ensuring they cover the whole of the state-funded job market in terms of acquiring vacancies by the ‘school entering vacancies’ method is another interesting question? As is, how much will it also cost to drive teachers to using the DfE site and not TeachVac or the TES?

A view of TeachVac’s account reveals that TeachVac provides access to more jobs for teachers at less than the DfE is going to spend on promoting their site over the next few months. Such spending only makes good commercial sense if you want to remove a player from the market.

So, here’s a solution. Hire TeachVac to promote the DfE site and use the data TeachVac already generates to monitor the working of the labour market. After all, that was also one of the suggestions from the Public Accounts Committee Report that spurred the DfE into action and the creation of their present attempt at running a vacancy site.

How much to advertise a teacher vacancy?

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Should a foreign owned company earn around £50 million from recruitment advertising largely paid for by schools located in England? I previously wrote about the published accounts of the tes a couple of years ago Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy? | John Howson (wordpress.com) This morning, Companies House published the TES GLOBAL Ltd accounts for 2020-21 covering the period up to the end of August 2021. The turnover in the UK of the Group was some £54 million; up from pre-pandemic levels of just under £52 million. Most of the income comes from subscription advertising, where schools pay the company an annual fee. Transactional advertising income continued to form a much smaller part of the company’s turnover.

Now, as regular readers of this blog are aware, I am not unbiased when it comes to the issue of recruitment advertising and the teacher vacancy market, having helped create TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk  well before the DfE started their job board.

There is an interesting question as to why schools are prepared to use TeachVac and the DfE site, but still pay shedloads of cash to the owners of the tes job board? For some it will be just inertia: nobody ever got fired for using the established player in the market. For some it will no doubt be a belief that tes has more teachers looking for vacancies than any other platform. TeachVac requires registration, so we know a lot more about our active job seekers than job boards that don’t require a sign-up. Interestingly, there seems little data in the tes accounts about usage of their platform by teachers. TeachVac regularly publishes data on matches, having passed the one million for 2022 earlier this week.

TeachVac has been dedicated to prove the concept that job boards don’t need to be expensive, and its current pricing model of £1 per match up to a maximum of £1,000 per school per year for secondary schools, and less for primary schools, is much cheaper than a subscription to tes.

Interestingly, tes has admin expenses of around £60 million, not all spent on the recruitment side of the business. However, it is vastly more than the £150,000 TeachVac costs to do a similar job of matching vacancies to job seekers. With the possibility of 75,000 vacancies on TeachVac this year, that’s a cost of little more than £2 per vacancy for TeachVac, compared with perhaps £4-500 per vacancy listed by the tes extrapolating from the information in the published accounts. This despite the company further reducing its headcount from 191 to 160 at the end of the accounting period.

In their accounts, tes’s owners cite software and development costs of £43,000,000. I wonder what that values that  places on TeachVac’s software when we come to do our annual accounts later this year?

Overall, TES GLOBAL Ltd has returned to losses in 2020-21, after a profit in the year before, when they sold their teacher supply business. The company still has a large interest burden effectively being serviced by schools.

The question, as ever, is, how long will schools be prepared to pay these prices for recruitment advertising when cheaper options are available?

TeachVac launches new service for schools

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The DfE Vacancy site for teachers is still a muddled mess. Eight years ago, well before the DfE woke up to the idea that the internet could be used for low cost but effective job matching, I helped create TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk and made it a free service for schools and teachers.

The basic rationale was simple – modern technology can cut the cost of finding a job and schools could save money as a result. After the Public Accounts Committee complained that the DfE didn’t have a grip on the labour market for teachers, the DfE set about creating a job board of their own.

At the start of the pandemic, I offered to share vacancies that the DfE didn’t upload with them to help to create a single free platform for teachers. Go away, I was told.

So, TeachVac still offers a free service, but is now launching its premium service whereby a school can ensure its vacancies are at the top of the list of matches a teacher receives each day. The service also provides a reminder after a few days so that teachers see the job more than once. Schools also receive labour market updates each month. All this for £500 per year for secondary schools and even less for primary schools across both state and private sectors schools.

Contact enquiries@oxteachserv.com for more information or to sign up and receive an early bird discount.

But, back the DfE site. Where, of course, teachers can only search for jobs in state schools. So, the site isn’t useful to those that don’t mind whether they work in state or private schools.

The front page of the DfE site is a real muddle. There are lists of ‘towns/cities and ‘counties’ although Chester West and Chester East aren’t counties, but unitary authorities. Towns within shire counties such as Oxford, Exeter, Chelmsford and many others don’t have a listing on the front page.  London has a single listing, not even split into the different pay area: not helpful if there are lots of vacancies in the Capital’s schools.

Milton Keynes receives a mention, but the rest of Buckinghamshire doesn’t. Still, there is a search buttons for key words and locations. A search on ‘secondary’ and ‘Oxford’ brings up 12 results. Four are non-teaching posts; two are in special schools or PRUs and only six are in secondary schools.

There is an alert function, but if it sends non-teaching posts as well as teaching vacancies it doesn’t do the job for which it is intended, unless the civil servants at the DfE think teachers that cannot find a teaching post will consider non-teaching roles and have the appropriate qualifications for such positions.

TeachVac is breaking records each month with 500,000+ matches so far in 2022, and over one million in this school year to date.

The earlier a school signs up for the premium service, the higher up the daily list of matches it will be placed. Don’t delay: sign up today by emailing enquiries@oxteachserv.com to express interest.

Recruitment 2022: a rough ride to come

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Can you tell anything about the 2022 recruitment round for teachers in England based upon just four days of vacancy data? One of the advantages of a job board such as TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk is the it has sufficient cumulative data on vacancies that can be allied with data about the numbers of teachers on preparation courses to be able to provide some helpful comments on the labour market, even after just four days of data.

For those that are sceptical of such a claim, consider sampling theory. A simple example is to assume a bowl of soup. A small spoonful will tell you whether or not the bowl if full of hot soup. Now scale up to a vat size container. Will a small sample tell you the same answer for the whole? Now purists might maintain that the bottom of the vat could be hotter than the top; I would agree. Taking that comment to vacancy data means that the comments for England as a whole might well include differences across the regions. Such an objection is true, and that is why each month TeachVac produces regional data for most secondary subjects and the primary sector. But it doesn’t invalidate sampling as a useful tool.

Anyway, back to our sample of 2022, and what I think it tells schools about the recruitment round this year. The first point is that it confirms what was being said at the end of 2021, appointments for September 2022 will be more of a challenge almost across the board as the 2020 bounce in interest in teaching as a career drops out of the supply side.

How bad will 2022 be? Well, nothing of concern in art, PE and history. Indeed, schools might well be starting to consider whether they can make use of an extra history teacher and perhaps an extra PE teacher to make use of the best of the trainees with second subject expertise in the pool of jobseekers.

At the other end of the scale, the usual suspects of design and technology where there will be real issues with recruitment have been joined this year by geography, modern languages and English. In the case of the latter two subjects this is partly because of the number of trainees on courses that will either already have placed them in the classroom or make it likely that they won’t be looking on the open market for a teaching post. Independent schools should take especial note of this fact when considering how easy it will be to recruit a teacher.

Most of the other subjects have seen the size of their ‘free pool’ decline this year compared with 2021, and that will have implications for January 2023 appointments. Such vacancies may be hard to fill in many subjects in those parts of England where recruitment is a challenge; namely London and the Home Counties.

Schools that have signed up to TeachVac’s £1,000 maximum annual recruitment package will receive regular updates on the state of the labour market, including local knowledge. On registration, and at no cost, schools receive a detailed report on the labour market.

Recruiters tell me that TeachVac is ‘too cheap’ to succeed because nothing that cheap could be any good. My principle in founding the job board was to show that recruitment advertising need not cost a lot of money. I still believe that to be true. Do you?

Covid and the Teacher Labour Market in England

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We now have data from twelve months that have suffered from the effects of the covd-19 pandemic. First thing this morning, I asked my analysts at TeachVac what had been the consequences for the teacher labour market in England. They came up with the following table for all vacancies.

2018201920202021
March715990299302
April813187356080
May10170114686357
June386248283286
July93312941043
August547565543
September295538843382
October418654383721
November366242583074
December201528931811
January5492638682162622
February5056579184215167
Monthly recorded vacancies for teachers in England

Source: TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk

Secondary teachers have suffered from a greater decline in their job opportunities than their primary colleagues. However, with the modern equivalent of ‘pool’ recruitment still in operation in parts of the primary sector, the figures are less reliable for that sector the for the secondary school sector where most schools manage their own recruitment.

Details data for local authority vacancy patterns and even those for a specific postcode are available on request, for a small fee. Data are also available for specific secondary subjects on a month by month basis, again for a small fee.

The next two months will be key ones for teachers looking for jobs. Will the market return to 2019 levels or continue to remain depressed. Much may depend upon the behaviour of the wider labour market for graduates. However, how many teachers decide to leave their jobs will also be important. It is also worth remembering that he supply of teachers leaving teacher preparation courses will not be sufficient in all subjects to meet the DfE’s estimate of need. How far ‘returners’ can make up the deficit only time will tell, but fewer advertised vacancies will also help close the gap.

I, for one, had wondered whether the pandemic and resulting effects on head teacher’s workload, might have resulted in a wave of departures. So far, in 2021, there is little evidence of any surge in departures of primary head teachers.

Although there have been fewer vacancies in London during the past twelve months, the Home Counties, and especially those parts of the Home Counties in the South East remain the part of the country driving the teacher labour market. This is not surprising as this are also contains the largest concentration of private schools. So far, these schools do not seem, as a sector, to have been badly affected by the pandemic in terms of pupil numbers. No doubt September enrolment will conform whether that is still the case.

Finally, although pupil numbers are still increasing in the secondary sector, will there be any effect from Brexit? Might some EU families return to their home country rather than stay in England? If so, could such departures have an effect on school rolls in some areas where there are large concentrations of EU citizen living in particular neighbourhoods? Comments on this point would be welcome.

Sluggish start for teaching vacancies in 2021

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January 2020 was a bumper month for teacher vacancies. Trainees, returning teachers and those looking for promotion were spoilt for choice across most of England, as secondary schools started recruiting early for September 2020. Fast forward a year, and with different priorities on the minds of school leadership teams, the slump in vacancies that started when the pandemic struck last spring has continued into the first part of January 2021.

TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk the vacancy site for teachers, where I am Chair, has recorded a 50% reduction in vacancies during the first 15 days of January 2021 compared with the same period in January 2020. In some secondary subjects, such as English and history, the slump has been even larger in percentage terms; vacancies are more than 60% down on last year.

Over England as a whole, there 1,300 fewer vacancies recorded by TeachVac during the first 15 days of January this year than during the same period last year. Looking back beyond the record rate of 2020, the January 2021 number is also below the number of vacancies recorded by TeachVac in both January 2018 and 2019.

Will these jobs return? The answer is that some will, but some won’t. The suggestion in the press that London has lost 700,000 of its population over the past twelve months, as foreign workers have returned home,  may help to explain why vacancies in the capital for teachers have been especially hard hit over the past twelve months. At present, the Midlands, both East and West, are also regions where there has been an appreciable fall-off in vacancies compared with last year.

In a recession, public sector workers with a secure job tend to stay put, so fewer teachers leaving either to take the chance on a new career or to teach overseas. This lack of movement has the effect of reducing demand for replacements. School budgets are under pressure as a result of the pandemic, so that is another factor that will delay recruitment activities, although TeachVac and the DfE site don’t cost schools cash. The DfE site does cost time and effort not required of schools by TeachVac.

As has been said in the past, there is no point in spending cash on recruitment until you have tried the free option and it hasn’t worked. TeachVac has matched 120,000 vacancies over the past two years and even if half resulted in an appointment that could have saved school millions of pounds in recruitment advertising.

TeachVac is currently preparing its reviews of 2020, and that on the Leadership Labour Market should be published next week: watch this blog for details. The wider review of classroom vacancies will appear later in the month. Both would have been faster had the government’s KickStart Scheme worked. On the Isle of Wight we still haven’t been offered any candidates through the Scheme, despite signing up almost on day one of the scheme’s announcement.

In summary, this may well be another year where the labour market favour employers over job-seekers, so registering with job sites such as TeachVac sooner rather than later may make sense for those seeking a teaching or school leadership post.

Pay Freeze: more churn?

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As expected, the main teacher associations acted with condemnation when faced with the Secretary of State’s remit letter to the STRB, the Pay and conditions of Service Review Body for the teaching profession.  In a joint statement from ACSL NAHT and NEU they said that;

The narrow remit issued to the STRB excludes the crucial and central issue of teacher and school leader pay, reflecting the Government’s unacceptable pay freeze policy.  Teachers and school leaders are key workers who have already seen their pay cut significantly since 2010.  With inflation expected to increase in 2021, they know that they face another significant real terms pay cut. 

How might their members react in 2021? We can expect a range of reactions. Some will say, there is no point in staying with no pay rise in sight – after all will the freeze really be just for one year? Head teachers at the top of their pay band, and having endured the prospect of two disrupted school years might well throw in the towel and take their pension as that presumably won’t be frozen in the same way; at least at present. We will look at that prospect and its consequences in more detail in a later blog.

Some teachers will seek promotion to secure a pay rise, and others a more appealing post either in a different school or in the private sector where there are no requirements for a pay freeze for teachers. Yet others may look overseas or to the tutoring market that will grow to support the increase in home schooling, especially if the government looks to regulation to ensure a minimum standard of education for all children regardless of how parents arrange to provide it. All these factors could increase ‘churn’.

With a profession dominated by women, at least at the level of the classroom teacher, how they and often also their partners view job security and new opportunities will also affect the rate of ‘churn’ if there is job movement around the country.

I actually think, at least in the first few months of 2021, there will be caution, and a desire to stay put and see what happens. With a labour market in teaching heavily skewed towards the first five months of the year, we could see fewer vacancies than normal in the early months of 2021. This will impact especially severely on two group of teachers: new entrants and would-be returners to the profession.

I well recall a Radio 5 Live interview in 2011, when callers were blaming each groups for taking jobs from the other. In reality, both groups were finding it more of a challenge to secure a teaching post, especially in some parts of England.

So, how hard will it be? We don’t know yet, so this is speculation based upon past trends, but I think some teachers will really struggle to secure a post in 2021.

Now might well be the time to revive ideas of a single application form for teaching, at least for personal details. This would leave just the free text statement to be written specifically for each vacancy being sought. The DfE should consider whether sponsoring that idea from those examples currently in development and on offer might be a better use of funds than continuing with their vacancy site that one person described to me in unflattering terms earlier this week.

In the next post, I will describe a new service from TeachVac to help teachers and schools assess the market and where vacancies might be found in 2021.