Tag Archives: schools

Imperial Measures

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The announcement of a consultation into the use of imperial measures either alongside or in place of metric measures – too European – timed to commence during the Jubilee weekend remind me of the following post that appeared on this blog in August 2019 which discussed the possibility of such an announcement.

That 2019 post also discussed the curriculum, another live topic with the Schools Bill that is currently wending its way through parliament and was based upon the decision to spend more on increasing the size of the prison estate rather than on preventing re-offending.  

Rods, poles and perches

Posted on August 11, 2019

The announcement of 10,000 new prison places and increased use of stop and search by the Prime Minister made me think about what he might announce for our schools and colleges once he goes beyond the financial carrot necessary to shore up our under-financed education system.

With such an ardent Brexiter in charge, could he direct that the curriculum changes on 1st November to throw out any reference to the decimal system and witness a return to imperial weights and measures? Could the government mandate that temperature again be expressed in degrees Fahrenheit rather than Centigrade, and kilometres be banished from the language once again? Any other summer and these might seem silly season stories, but not in 2019.

I have no doubt that schools would rather that spend the £2 billion to build new prison places that this cash was spent on youth services, more cash for special schools and strategies to reduce exclusions and off-rolling by schools. This could include better provision of professional development courses to help teachers educate challenging pupils, rather than exclude them. Such measures might obviate the need for building new prisons.

I do not want to return to the dark days of the Labour government, just over a decade ago, when, at any one time, around 4,000 young people were being locked up: the number now is closer to 1,000 despite the issues with knife crime that like drugs issues is now seeping across the country at the very time when it seems to have plateaued in London.

More police and other public service staff are necessary for society to function effectively, but the aim must be focused on prevention and deterrents not on punitive action and punishment. Criminals that know they are likely to be caught may well think twice: those that know detection rates are abysmal will consider the opportunity worth the risk.

The State also needs to spend money on the education and training of prisoners as well as the rehabilitation of offenders after the end of their sentence; especially young offenders. The recent report from the Inspector of Prisons makes as depressing reading as the study highlighted in a previous post of the background of many young people that are incarcerated for committing crimes. If we cannot even work to prevent the smaller number of young people imprisoned these days from re-offending, what hope is there if society starts to lock up more young people again?

A recurrent theme of this blog has been about the design of the curriculum for the half of our young people not destined for higher education. Here the new government could do something sensible by recognising that schools have accepted that the EBacc offers too narrow a curriculum to offer to every pupil and to encourage a post-14 offering that provides for the needs of all pupils. This might be achieved by encouraging schools and further education to work together.

A start might be made by increasing the funding for the 16-18 sector and identifying what was good about the idea of University Technical Colleges and Studio Schools and why the experiment has not worked as its promoters had hoped.

Re-learning the role of Recruitment Strategy Managers

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The DfE has published some useful research papers about Education opportunity Areas. The one of immediate interest to me is on recruitment in the Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area. Inspire by Teaching Recruitment evaluation North Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area Intervention Level Evaluation Report (publishing.service.gov.uk) At one point, although the report doesn’t mention it, TeachVac provided a report on vacancy trends at specific schools.

There is much re-learning in this report. More than 20 years ago, the DfEE the government Department at that time responsible for schools provided funding for local authority Recruitment Strategy Managers to help specific areas manage a recruitment problem in a period of teacher shortages. A report on their effectiveness was prepared in October 1999 and I have a copy before me as I write this blog.

Nearly a quarter of a century later and there is the evaluation of this project called the IBTR (Inspire by Teaching Recruitment (IBTR) project) that dealt with not only teaching vacancies, but also non-teaching roles.

Some 20% of the vacancies were filled from outside the local area. That raises interesting questions about the cost of national recruitment that this blog has discussed before – Teacher Vacancy Platforms; Pros and cons, 7th December 2020 – and the report does discuss this issue

‘Prior to the project, headteachers would typically take out an advert in the local or national press for their vacancies. A national advert might be in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and could cost up to £1500, while a local advert could be on a local authority site and cost up to £50. The DfE teacher vacancy website was being established in 2019 around the same time as this evaluation. No headteachers mentioned the DfE teacher vacancy website unprompted during any wave of the fieldwork7’.

Footnote 7 ‘Teaching Vacancies, the DfE’s free search and listing service for state funded schools in England, now plays a larger role than when this report was drafted. As it stands today, Teaching Vacancies is used widely across the region with 220 vacancies in the last year. The website actively directs users to Teaching Vacancies and schools in this region actively use Teaching Vacancies to advertise their vacancies.’  Page 27 and footnote.

Interestingly, TeachVac doesn’t rate a mention in the report even though we were asked to supply staff in the Opportunity Area with a custom-made report on vacancies. Taken together, TeachVac and the DfE site do make the case for a low-cost on-line job board. The issue with the DfE but not with TeachVac is that the DfE only handles jobs from state schools and requires schools to upload vacancies twice, to their site and the DfE site. Teachers want a site with a guarantee of almost universal coverage as a one-stop shop for vacancies, as do those seeking non-teaching posts.

However, back to the issue of what needs to be managed locally and what centrally? Paying £1,500 for national advertising seems these days wasteful of scare resources. If 80% of vacancies are filled either locally or from the region then locally managed projects do seem like good value for money and better value than every school doing their own thing.

TeachVac has now launched its premium service for vacancies based upon a no match: no fee model. We believe that offers a sensible way forward at a low cost of £1 per match and an annual maximum of £1,000 per school – less than the cost of one TES advert quoted in the report. Finally, it is worth noting that the costs of marketing promotion, advertising and web portal for this one Opportunity Area were more than the annual cost of running TeachVac for the whole of England for a year.

Some still do better than others

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The DfE has published an interesting report on outcomes by ethnicity and Free School Meals. It might have been even more useful with a section on gender added and also some regional breakdown to see if the additional funding in the London area makes any difference to outcomes. Outcomes by ethnicity in schools in England – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

For many, the inclusion of Traveller children and their performance will come as a shock as these groups don’t regularly appear in most tables. Funding for the education of traveller children hasn’t been high on anyone’s agenda for many years. Perhaps now it the time to reassess how we offer education to the children in the travelling community.

The Report makes clear the poor outcomes for certain sections of some communities, especially those pupils on Free school Meals.  

According to the DfE report there were over 8 million pupils recorded in the school census in 2021. Ethnicity responses in the report are grouped into 17 options or “Any other” as a catch-all category. I guess some South American children might fall into this group.

The DfE points out that it is important to consider variation within groups, especially when aggregated into larger groups such as “White” or “Asian”.  When aggregated 72% of pupils (5.9 million) described their ethnicity as White, 11% (900,000) Asian excluding Chinese, and around 6% each as Mixed (520,000) or Black (460,000). 2% of pupils described themselves as belonging to ethnic groups not captured in the census (170,000), and 0.5% of pupils identify as Chinese (37,000).

An important finding is that the proportion of White British pupils meeting the expected standard falls at each stage in their education.

Other groups also see fluctuations across stages, but the effect is most pronounced in the White British Group. As seen in figure 2, White British pupils fall from 5th of 18 groups in younger groups to 10th later in school. This is reflected in the average Progress 8 score of a White British GCSE entrant being negative (-0.14) where 0 represents average progress through secondary school. The DfE comment that since Progress 8 is a relative metric, we cannot say whether this trajectory represents “catch-up” of some non-White British groups or a “falling behind” effect.

However, some other groups also fare badly according to the report

‘Black Caribbean, Mixed White and Black Caribbean and Other Black pupils are all less likely to meet the expected standard at all stages than White British pupils, and the size of this gap doubles between 4- to 5-year-olds and GCSE pupils.

Comparing between a class of 30 White British pupils and a class of 30 pupils from these 3 groups, on average 1 or 2 more pupils in the Black and Mixed class would be below the expected standard at 4 to 5 years-old, whereas 3 to 5 fewer pupils would receive a strong pass in English and Maths GCSE. 11. The average progress 8 scores of Black Caribbean (-0.30) and Mixed White/Black Caribbean (-0.37) pupils are more negative than the White British group. Pupils selecting Black Other (+0.08) have slightly positive average progress 8 score.

Gypsy/Roma, and Irish Traveller pupils have the consistently lowest levels of attainment of any ethnic group, and the most negative progress 8 scores.’

The report notes that five groups made below average progress throughout secondary school. These groups are – White British, Black Caribbean, Mixed White/Black Caribbean, and Gypsy/Roma, Irish Traveller pupils. These groups start with lower attainment scores following primary school, so low progress scores represent a confounding effect where these groups are falling further behind their peers. Controlling for FSM, only White and Black Caribbean groups have below average progress among non-FSM recipients. White FSM recipients have the lowest progress among all aggregated groups, and Mixed and Black groups have below average progress.

This report is powerful evidence for the levelling up agenda discussion and also for the discussion on the hard National Funding Formula currently being discussed as part of the Schools Bill before parliament. Once again, it raises the question over the degree of hypothecation required in funding schools and how the money is both used and evaluated. Interestingly, there is nothing in this report about the use of Pupil Premium monies as a hypothecated grant.

Has DfE policy already affected ITT outcomes?

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The repercussions of the re-accreditation process for ITT are already reverberating around the teacher preparation world. The DfE may possibly be embarking on the most radical realignment of providers since the cull of institutions in the 1970s. As then, the end of a growth in pupil numbers meant the demand for new teachers will reduce going forward, especially if the traditional assumptions on the scale of demand remain true.

This is not the place to discuss both the effect of mass tutoring and the creation of teaching as a global profession on the demand for teachers by schools in England. Those issues have already been rehearsed previously on this blog.

This post looks at the monthly ITT data on applications published by the DfE yesterday, and containing data up to the 16th May. The headline news is that applications continue to be depressed. In some subjects they are well below the boost that the pandemic provided last year.

Even more alarming is the fact that in many secondary subjects ‘offers’ and recruited trainees for September are at their lowest May levels for more than a decade. For instance, physics has just 337 in the offer categories. However, a further 243 applications are under consideration. In computing the 244 offers is a record low for May, and there are only 219 applications awaiting a decision, and around two thirds of the total applications are shown as unsuccessful.

The ‘offer’ side of the equation seems lower than in past years for this point in the cycle. Have providers reacted to a combination of late targets – not announced until April, rather than at the start of the cycle – the uncertainty surrounding the re-accreditation process, and the return of Ofsted to be much more cautious about offers than in the past?

Take a subject such as music, where one would assume that a music degree and proficiency in at least one instrument were a likely ‘given’ for applicants. However, even here, 478 of the 773 applications are show as unsuccessful. Now, I assume this includes successful applicants that have opted for one provider and are no longer holding offers at other providers, but that would mean a maximum of 295 potential trainees.

Overall candidate numbers are down from 34,490 in May 2021 to 28,977 this May. That’s below the 30,610 of May 2020. As one might expect at this time of year, the decline in career changers has had more impact than the decline in this year’s graduates, although even the numbers of applicants under 23 that are mostly new graduates, are down on last year, although holding up well compared with 2020. How this group reacts once degrees are awarded will be very important for the outcome of this year’s recruitment round. Will they look to teaching as a safe haven in uncertain times or will they be lured by the tight labour market into ignoring teaching as an option?

The regional spread of candidates is worrying, with London seeing fewer than 5,000 candidates across both primary and secondary phases compared with around 5,500 even in 2020, and 6,800 in May last year. Even in the North East, candidate numbers are fewer than 1,100 compared with 1,500 in 2020 and 1,450 last May.  Apart from the teaching apprenticeship route, all other routes into teaching are suffering downturns.

Unless the economy collapses over the next couple of months, this year’s ITT targets will be widely missed, except in history and physical education. Even in these subjects the over-recruitment may well be less than in recent times, meaning an even tighter a labour market for September 2023 and January 2024, unless there is an influx or returners to make up the shortfall.

What remains certain is that without enough teachers the aims of the recent White Paper cannot be met. Perhaps that’s why teachers receive scant mention in the new Schools Bill currently before parliament.

Children in Care: the civil rights issue for our time

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An important independent report on children in care was published today Final Report – The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (independent-review.uk) Those of you that have read my blog post about the need for a Jacob’s Law will find much to be encouraged by in the suggestions for change contained within this new report. Time for Jacob’s Law | John Howson (wordpress.com)

Sadly, there is also much to be concerned about as well. One outstanding section of the Executive Summary really resonated with me when I read it for the first time.

The disadvantage faced by the care experienced community should be the civil rights issue of our time. Children in care are powerless, are often invisible and they face some of the greatest inequalities that exist in England today. In spite of these injustices so many ‘care’ experienced people go on to run businesses, start families, earn doctorates, produce drama, write poetry, become government ministers and contribute to the world in countless ways

Five ambitious missions are needed so that care experienced people secure: loving relationships; quality education; a decent home; fulfilling work and good health as the foundations for a good life. Central government and local authorities, employers, the NHS, schools, colleges and universities must step up to secure these foundations for all care experienced people. This will require a wider range of organisations to act as corporate parents for looked after children, and the UK should be the first country in the world to recognise the care experience as a protected characteristic.

Executive-summary.pdf (independent-review.uk) Page 11

This afternoon, the House of Lords debates the Second Reading of the new Schools Bill, and I hope that a need for a Jacob’s Law, ensuring rapid admission to schools for children taken into care and required to move school, will receive at least a passing mention. Adding a Clause about in-year admissions and local authority requirements on academies to take such children would be a quick win for this group of what one might call ‘bin bag kids’. They earn that epithet because all too often they come home and find all their possessions in black bin bags in the bag of a social worker’s car. Just imagine how you would feel if that happened to you as a teenager?

Perhaps it is not surprising that a significant number of young people in our young Offenders Institutions have experienced a period in care. In the Inspection Report on Werrington YOI published recently 42 of the 91 young people survey had been in care at some point before receiving a custodial sentence or serving time on remand. Werrington-web-2020.pdf (justiceinspectorates.gov.uk)

Even though these are difficult economic times, some rebalancing of government priorities remains necessary, and both ensuring services are in place to prevent child neglect – often the most common reason for young children being taken into care – and creating better outcomes for those that are taken into care is a vital necessity as the report published today makes clear.

Every councillor with responsibility as a corporate parent should ask themselves the question: can my Council do more for these young people?

How much holiday do teachers have?

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According to the DfE’s Teacher recruitment website

Holidays

You’ll get more days holiday than people in many other professions. In school, full-time teachers work 195 days per year.

For comparison, you’d work 227 days per year (on average) if you worked full time in an office.

Teaching salaries and benefits | Get Into Teaching (education.gov.uk)

So, it is permissible according to the government, to never be in school when the pupils are not present except for the five compulsory days required. Those days were originally known as ‘Baker Days’ after the Secretary of State that mandated their requirement.

Of course, the DfE site doesn’t say anything about the length of the school day, and the marking and preparation time spent in the evenings, at weekends, and during the alleged holiday period that make up a teacher’s typical working day.

A more useful analyses of the working year might add the following days – assuming the five days pupils are not present account for all the days immediately pre and post the three terms of the year – to the 195 total.

Two hours a day during term-time on marking and preparation and meetings outside a working day of a period between eight am until four pm would add more than a day a week to the total taking it from 195 days (DfE number) by adding an extra 38 days a year meaning the working year would then be 233 days a year compared with the DfE calculation of 227 as an average for an office worker of an unspecified grade. Now, make that an average of three hours a day – probably not unreasonable for most weeks – and the total moves to around 250 days a year.

The length of the working day and the compensation for the length of the working day isn’t something mentioned on the DfE recruitment site. Find a teaching job with no planning – all done for you – and no marking needed outside of the school day – and there are still parents’ evening to attend that can add four days to the total – one half days for each year group plus one for the new intake, plus perhaps a couple of marketing evenings to showcase the school to potential pupils and their parents. Then there are after-school activities ranging from supervising the buses in the car park to accompanying teams to sports fixture, music and drama events and science competitions.

It is difficult to see how a teacher that wants to do their job properly can manage less than 227 days a year.

On top of this, most other workers have been gaining bank holidays over the years, whereas most additional days have fallen within existing school holidays, except for the Bank Holiday at the beginning of May each year. In 2017, the Labour Party suggested the need for four extra bank holidays Bank holidays for teachers? | John Howson (wordpress.com) that suggestion would not have benefitted teachers at all.

So, if told teachers have long holiday, and remember that the DfE says so, remind people that teachers work a form of employer-driven flexitime that means most teachers work longer on average than many other employees, although they do still have job security in most cases and there is the pension to consider.

New Schools Bill published

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The Schools Bill, (no apostrophe) foreshadowed in the Queen’s Speech, has now been published as a House of Lords Bill. This means that the legislation starts in the House of Lords before then progressing to the House of Commons rather than the other way around. This isn’t unusual when there is a heavy legislative schedule. For instance, the 2003 Licensing Act started life as House of Lords Bill Schools Bill [HL] (parliament.uk)

The government has issued a set of notes and policy explanations for each section of the Bill Schools Bill: policy statements – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) Key sections are on Academies, funding and attendance. The Bill is very technical, and looks in its initial iteration to be sorting out some oversight issues to ensure a national education system with minimal democratic involvement, just like the NHS.

I especially like Clause 3

3 Academies: power to apply or disapply education legislation

(1) The Secretary of State may by regulations provide—

(a) for any relevant provision to apply to an Academy (or to a type or 5 description of Academy) as it applies in England to another educational institution, subject to any prescribed modifications;

(b) for any relevant provision which applies in England both to an Academy and to another educational institution not to apply to, or to apply subject to prescribed modifications to, an Academy (or to a type or description of Academy).

There are some exceptions listed, but this is the sort of sweeping power for the Secretary of State that used to worry parliamentarians.

Part Three of the Bill is about School Attendance, and will no doubt carry much of the discussion at the Second Reading next week. The argument revolves around child safeguarding and children’s rights to education versus the right of a parent to decide the education of their child or children. The Bill doesn’t go so far as to require schooling, but it does seek to tighten up knowing what choices parents have made for their children’s education. The establishment of a register may raise questions for the traveller community.  

Sadly, despite appearing in the past two White Papers, I cannot find anything in the Bill about the return on in-year admissions to local authorities. I hope someone may decide to put down an amendment to Section Three to include this provision, not least for the benefit of children taken into care requiring a new school, and those with an EHCP that move into an area with limited special school places.

Even if the government can argue that there are regulations to cover the change, it would still be better on the face of the Bill.

Following the decision on a National Funding Formula, I am not sure what role Schools Forums will play in the future, and whether headteachers will take them seriously anymore?

The Chief Inspector will now be able to ask a Magistrate for an entry warrant in certain circumstances. Along with the provisions for regulation of independent education establishments this continues the theme of protecting children, but some may see it as heavy-handed from a Conservative government. The debate next week will make for interesting reading in Hansard.

Find a teacher

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As the 26th May and ‘Thank a Teacher’ Day draws nearer I have looked at TeachVac statistics for vacancies in 2022 up to the 10th May compared with the vacancy number for the whole of 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. The statistics make for grim reading.

In seven areas, the total vacancies recorded so far in 2022 exceed the total recorded for the whole of 2019.

Subject 20192022Percentage +/- (The nearest whole %)
Teaching and Learning(Pastoral)50271542%
SEN61084539%
Social Sciences888107721%
RE1127132818%
Design & Technology252426646%
Leadership470850036%
IT182618461%
Business16571599-4%
Languages29322793-5%
Vocational432408-6%
Geography18121702-6%
Music11801031-13%
History13651190-13%
Total6456954453-16%
PE19831575-21%
Primary1664612964-22%
Science80596066-25%
Mathematics68485017-27%
Art1337952-29%
English63874253-33%
Source: TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk

These include subject areas such as religious education and design and technology where there have already been more vacancies posted in the first four and a bit months of 2022 than during the whole of 2019. Grim news for any school looking for a September appointment and possibly a catastrophe for schools that will need to make an appointment for January 2023.

Interestingly, it is still the EBacc subjects where recruitment is less buoyant. In the case of maths, English and the sciences, vacancies are still adrift of the 2019 total by some margin. That doesn’t mean everything is great, even in these subjects because the vacancies are still close to the total for the pool of new entrants, especially once those trainees already committed to schools are excluded from the calculations.

So, ‘Thank a Teacher’ Day must also be ‘recruit a trainee into teaching’ day, week and month if we are going to continue to improve the education for all children wherever they live and whatever school they attend.

At TeachVac, we monitor trends at every level from geographical to phase and subject and career grade. Our reports provide invaluable intelligence to schools, MATs, dioceses, local authorities and others interested in the labour market for teachers. The reports are also the most comprehensive daily reports available.

There are still a couple of weeks to go to the resignation date at the end of May and so far, this week, TeachVac has recorded more than 2,800 new vacancies in the course of just two days. By the end of this week, the total for 2022 could be in excess of 55,00 or less than 9,000 behind the total for the whole of 2019.

The teaching workforce crisis doesn’t receive the same attention as the NHS crisis, but its effects are just as key to the nation’s health, welfare and economic prosperity. Sadly, there was no recognition in the Queen’s speech of the issues facing teacher supply. Rearranging the organisational structure of schooling by making all schools academies may be a solution, but don’t bet on it.

Blame it on Easter

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

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

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

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

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

Source TeachVac from UCAS and DfE data

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

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

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

 Source TeachVac from UCAS and DfE data

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

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

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

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

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?