Two thirds of ITT courses offering psychology via the DfE website no longer have vacancies. Nearly half the courses training teachers in Latin, and four out of ten of the physical education courses also no longer have vacancies, as of 4th May. That’s the good news.
At the other end of the scale, between 90-92% of the science courses still have at least one vacancy, with little difference between courses for biology, chemistry or physics teachers despite some generous incentives to teach the subjects. Most of the remaining courses have more than three quarters of courses still recruiting, including courses for primary school teachers.
This data is interesting because it reveals recruitment issues are widespread across England and not just confined to a few regions. If the latter was the case, then it would be likely that courses in some regions would be showing ‘no vacancies’ by now. Generally, that doesn’t appear to be the case except in psychology and the small number of other subjects were above average numbers of courses have no vacancies.
The next big challenge comes in June, when new graduates have to decide their future. Will the worsening economic outlook cause a recruitment bounce such as was seen in 2020 during the height of the first wave of the covid pandemic? Perhaps we will have to wait until 2023 before the labour market for graduates tightens sufficiently for graduates to turn to teaching.
Can we start to suggest that the longest period of teacher shortages might be drawing to an end with a spectacular array of unfilled places in 2022.
However, to really solve the teacher supply crisis, at least at recruitment into training of postgraduates, the profession has to look attractive to graduates, and the recent hike to more than 12% on loan repayments may well act as a deterrent. The outcome of this year’s STRB review of pay and conditions will also be crucial, as will be the willingness of the government to accept the Report.
The one good note for the government is the reduction in the size of the primary school population and thus, a likely requirement for fewer teachers in the next few years. This will especially be the case if the hard Funding Formula causes small schools to close in any numbers, making for more efficient class sizes.
Pupil numbers in the secondary sector will also level out, if not decline, in a few years’ time and that will also potentially take the pressure of training numbers for the secondary sector. However, if teachers continue to switch to tutoring or teaching overseas, then any decline in the need for teachers from a reduction in pupil numbers will be offset by a growing demand for other reasons.
In the meantime, persuading new graduates to select teacher training might be where the government can best spend its marketing budget over the next couple of months.
45,000 teacher vacancies were advertised so far in 2022. There were only 65,000 vacancies advertised during the whole of 2021, so demand in 2022 is much higher than in recent years. The pool of teachers to fill these vacancies has largely been exhausted, and secondary schools seeking teachers of most subjects, apart for PE, history, drama and art, will struggle to find candidates to appoint during the remainder of 2022 regardless of wherever the school is located in England.
The data, correct up to Friday 29th April was collected by TeachVac, the National Vacancy Service for all teachers. www.teachvac.co.uk The situation in terms of teacher supply at the end of April is worse than in any of the eight years that TeachVac has been collecting data on teacher vacancies.
Schools can recruit teachers from various sources, including those on initial teacher training courses where they are not already committed to a school (Teach First and School Direct Salaried trainees are employed by specific schools); teachers moving schools and the broad group classified as ‘returners’ to teaching. This last group includes that previously economically inactive, usually as a result of a career break to care for young children or elderly relatives, plus those switching from other sectors of education including further education or returning from a period teaching overseas.
In extremis, where schools cannot find any candidates from these routes, a school may employ an ‘unqualified teacher’. This year that may include Ukrainian teachers displaced by the war as well as anyone else willing to take a teaching post. This was the route that I entered teaching in 1971. Generally, such teachers need considerable support in the early stages of their careers.
Normally, the labour market for teachers is a ‘free market’ with vacancies advertised and anyone free to apply. Can such a situation be allowed to continue? The DfE should convene a summit of interested parties to discuss the consequences of the present lack of supply of teachers facing schools across England looking to recruit a teacher in a wide range of subjects.
On the agenda should be, the effect of a lack of supply on the levelling up agenda; the costs of trying to recruit teachers; how best to use the remaining supply of PE, history, art, drama and primary sector trained teachers to make maximum use of scare resources, and how to handle any influx of ‘unqualified’ teachers.
The data for geography teacher vacancies, not normally seen as a shortage subject, reveals the seriousness of the current position for schools still seeking to fill a vacancy for September 2022 or faced with an unexpected vacancy in the autumn for January 2023.
With recruitment into training for courses starting in September 2022, already under pressure the issue of teacher supply is not just one for this year. Unless teaching is made a more attractive career and steps are taken to ensure maximum effective use of the teachers available then some children’s education will be compromised and their future career choices put in jeopardy.
This is an interesting article written with the support of The Gatsby Foundation on the effect of special retention payments on keeping mathematics and science teachers in state schools Paying early career science teachers 5% more keeps significant numbers in the classroom | Education | Gatsby Personally, I wish researchers would not talk about teachers leaving the profession when they mean no longer working in stated funded schools. These teachers might be working in private schools, the further education sector or Sixth Form Colleges whose employees are not captured in the annual Teacher Workforce Survey.
My other concern with this interesting piece of research is the regional bias to the data. As a result of using specific payments rather than the generic use of retention payments, most of the areas surveyed are in either Yorkshire and The Humber region or in the North East of England. The latter region offers teachers few opportunities for transfer between schools due to the limited number of vacancies each year compared with other regions according to TeachVac data www.teachvac.couk .
The fact of reduced numbers of vacancies on offer might mask a group of teachers staying in state schools, but moving to a different school. In Constable et al (1999) a research report for the University of Northumbria on the supply of teachers of physics, the ability to teach ‘A’ level physics early in a teaching career was an important motivation for teachers, as was the opportunity to teach mathematics rather than the other sciences for physicists when not timetabled to teach physics.
In a part of the country, such as the North East, with relatively little other graduate opportunities, especially compared to say the London region where not only are they many private school vacancies but also a buoyant graduate market, it would have been interesting to review the cohort in this Gatsby funded research with say a similar cohort of Teach First trainees to review any differences in the economic benefits between classroom based salary supported training and post-training retention incentives.
Of course, keeping teachers in schools is only part of the battle. Such policies help the schools where these teachers work but do nothing for other schools suffering as a result of the overall shortage of teachers in say, physics. Do subject enhancement courses that attract more recruits have a better economic return or could perhaps retaining other science teachers or even mathematics teachers to teach physics be more cost-effective than offering higher salaries to those that have chosen to teacher physics. Understanding, as Constable et al tried to do, what motivates physics teachers either to stay or to leave ibn more general terms might help devise new policies to overcome teacher shortages.
Tracking expertise might also be helped if Qualified Teacher Status was tied to specific subjects and only temporary accreditation to teach a subject was granted to those without the appropriate training and subject knowledge. This might help keep better track of where shortages are to be found.
The full list of changes is shown in the table below
subject
number 21/22
number 22/23
difference
Total
31030
32600
1570
Primary
10800
11655
855
Total
20230
20945
715
Modern Languages
1505
2140
635
Design & Technology
1475
1825
350
Computing
840
1145
305
Others
1980
2240
260
Geography
745
945
200
English
1980
2100
120
Physics
2530
2610
80
History
780
850
70
Classics
40
30
-10
Religious Education
470
450
-20
Physical Education
1010
980
-30
Biology
820
780
-40
Drama
330
290
-40
Art & Design
580
530
-50
Music
540
470
-70
Business Studies
725
635
-90
Chemistry
1080
885
-195
Mathematics
2800
2040
-760
Source: DfE
As the DfE noted in their announcement ‘It is also important to note that recruitment to postgraduate ITT in 2022/23 has not been limited for any subject except physical education. Therefore, although targets for certain subjects may have decreased compared to last year, this does not necessarily mean there will be fewer trainees recruited as a consequence – recruitment can exceed targets.’
This statement, of course, raises the question of why have targets? The answer is complicated, and has been a matter for debate for many years. I assume that The Treasury wants some idea of both how the DfE will spent its cash on schemes it operates, and what the drawdown of student loans could be at its maximum. Both are legitimate questions for government to ask. For a number of years, I was part of a group that discussed these targets before they were released, in those days in the autumn as recruitment to the round was about to start. Now, I read them at the same time as everyone else.
The DfE commentary also notes that adjustments have been made for under-recruitment in certain subjects.
‘A key driver of whether the 2022/23 targets have increased/fallen for specific secondary subjects is the extent to which those targets have been adjusted to build in the impact of recruitment being below target in the two previous ITT rounds before 2022/23.
An example of a subject where such an adjustment has been made is modern languages. In the previous two ITT rounds, recruitment for modern languages was below target, so we have increased the 2022/23 target for modern languages to account for this previous under-recruitment. This is the first time we have made such an adjustment for the subject, leading to modern languages having the largest percentage increase in targets this year.
For some subjects, the impact of previous under-recruitment against targets can be offset by other factors. A good example of this is mathematics, where we have seen a decrease in the 2022/23 target compared to last year’s target. Whilst the 2020/21 and 2021/22 PGITT targets for mathematics were not met, the impact of this under-recruitment was more than offset by increases in the numbers of PGITT trainees, returners, and teachers that are new to the state-funded sector being recruited. Furthermore, there was an increase in the proportion of mathematics trainees entering the workforce immediately after ITT.’
This comment from the DfE suggests that retraining courses for serving teachers in subjects such as mathematics might now be considered when calculating targets. It would have been interesting to have seen the worked example for mathematics in order to see which of factors was important in reducing the total to a number close to that for English. Certainly, TeachVac has recorded lower demand for mathematics this year than might have been expected.
Interestingly, in the list of factors affecting the calculation of the targets, the DfE focus on factors affecting inflows. It is not clear the extent to which the changing global marketplace for teachers affects ‘outflows’ and whether any pause due to the effects of covid may have only been a temporary reduction in the number of teachers departing these shores?
The issue of including the effects of under-recruitment in the current targets is an interesting one. Schools start each September fully staffed, so there is a risk that by including the shortfall from previous years in the new target the supply is inflated to a point where a proportion of trainees won’t find a teaching post. It would be interesting to see if these are mostly likely to be trainees with student loans not training through an employer managed route. The DfE will have that data. Inflated targets can also lead to places being provided in parts of the country where there are not jobs. This was a consequence of using this methodology in the 1990s.
At the present time, this consideration of whether to include a previous shortfall in the current target is merely an academic discussion in most subjects, since 2022 will most likely again see courses fail to hit even these revised targets where they have been lowered, except perhaps in Chemistry and possibly mathematics, both subjects where over-recruitment is permitted.
However, the methodology used in calculating targets via the Teacher Supply model (TSM) process may become more important for providers in coming years as pupil numbers stabilise and funding comes under pressure, especially if large salary increases to cop with high inflation are not fully funded by government.
There will be tough times ahead in the ITT world. Will schools want to stay involved and what will be the collective views of Vice Chancellors towards the DfE and ITT?
Easter is a good time for a spot of spring cleaning. When I was reorganising my collection of paraphernalia about the teacher supply market that I have collected over the past few decades I came across a copy of ‘Teacher Training places in England: September 2013’ , a book that I wrote with Chris Waterman.
This loose-left book was primarily a collection of maps showing the location of the different providers in the brave new world of School Direct then coming on stream. There was also a short history of teacher supply by way of an introduction that drew heavily on my 2008 work for Policy Exchange. (I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t ask me to write for them now, but then they were more open-minded).
2013 was the start of the period of challenge for teacher supply in England that continues to this day, with just the relief from the first year of the covid pandemic when teaching looked like a safe haven in an uncertain job market. Sadly, the attractiveness of teaching as a career didn’t last long, as this blog has documented with the data from the DfE admissions process.
Interestingly, 2013 saw the DfE’s foray into admissions, with their handling of the new School Direct programme. Their process displayed how many places were on offer and how many remained and I spent that Easter going through the whole list to determine the situation. My findings were rehearsed in this early post on the blog Is School Direct working? | John Howson (wordpress.com)
But, back to the book. There was a table on page six of the different routes into teaching at that time, and their relative cost to students, as well as another column explaining the extent of higher education involvement.
Despite several decades of attack from governments, higher education is still heavily involved with teacher preparation. This continued involvement of higher education has allowed the DfE to avoid the question of how to fund training. By passing the problem to the Treasury through the imposition of fees it doesn’t have to face up to the reality of being responsible for all the costs. After all, students make the choice of accepting loans.
However, the recent announcement that the interest rate on student loans will increase to around 12% from September does raise the question as to whether or not this is a tipping point where graduates will not be prepared to choose routes into teaching with more debt and no salary, especially when other routes into teaching offer both a salary and no extra debt burden.
The Labour government stunned the education world when it introduced the £6,000 training grant in March 2000. Civil servants might like to dust of the minutes produced in the lead up to that decision to see whether they might once again be of use in making the case for a universal grant to all graduates training to be a teacher.
The irony of a history teacher paying full fees starting teaching humanities alongside a geography teacher in the next classroom that benefitted from a bursary when they were both on the same training course won’t be lost on the profession, even if the professional associations seem incapable of doing anything for those of their members faced with fees and extra debt.
There must be a lot of nervous secondary school headteachers at the start of this Easter break. Over the past two weeks TeachVac has recorded 7,800 new vacancies for teachers. These vacancies have been posted by schools across England, but especially by schools in the South East Region. Nationally, the total is a record for any two-week period during the past eight years that TeachVac has been collecting data on vacancies from state and private schools across England.
I can confidently predict that not all these vacancies will be filled, and that some will be filled by teachers with ‘less than ideal’ subject knowledge. So bad is the situation nationally that one major international recruitment agency is offering a rereferral bonus of £250, presumably to attract new teachers to its books to help fill vacancies. With the size of TeachVac’s list of candidates that are matched each day with vacancies that puts an interesting valuation on the company.
Seriously though, TeachVac has an index that compares recorded vacancies with the reported number of trainees from the DfE’s census. This system has used a consistent methodology for eight years and is now also showing signs of how much stress the system is under. Not for twenty years, during what was the severe recruitment challenge around the millennium, have secondary schools, especially in parts of the south of England, but not exclusively in that area of the country, faced recruitment challenges on the present scale.
As readers of previous posts will know, the intake into training for September 2022 isn’t looking healthy either at present as was confirmed in the chat during the recent APPG webinar on the White Paper.
With fewer partners of EU citizens probably coming to work here as teachers while their partners used to work elsewhere in the economy, and the international school scene not yet affected by the geo-politics of the moment, it is probably correct to talk of an emerging crisis now reaching most parts of the curriculum outside of schools recruiting primary school teachers and physical education, history and art teachers in secondary schools.
The predictions about any crisis and its depth compared to previous years will be confirmed if there are a large number of re-advertisements in early May, especially if they come with added incentives such as TLRs and Recruitment and Retention bonuses as schools seek to ensure timetables are fully staffed for September 2022.
One casualty of the present situation may well be the levelling up agenda in a market-based labour market. All else being equal, where would a teacher choose to work, a school that is challenging or one that is less demanding? Last spring, I wrote a blog about the challenges schools in the West Midlands with high levels of free school meals faced in recruiting teachers when compared with other schools in the same area. TeachVac is again collecting this data for schools across England. However, with this level of vacancies we won’t have the funds to analyse the data this year.
TeachVac monitors published data on the level of applications to train as a teacher. This monitoring is in addition to its teacher job matching system at www.teachvac.co.uk.
Each month there is a post on this blog about ‘offers’ to would-be trainees and how numbers compare with the previous year. In 2020, there was a covid bounce in applications, as teaching looked like a safe career if the labour market was about to implode. Thanks to the furlough scheme and changes in working practices, graduate unemployment didn’t take off. As a result, 2021 was a more challenging year for teacher training than was 2020, and, from the ‘offers’ perspective, 2022 looks to be no better and potentially even worse in some subjects than 2021.
Another method of measuring the health of the trainee teacher market is to look at how quickly courses fill up with trainees. The DfE site that has replaced UCAS this year has the number of courses with vacancies by subject and sector and the total number of courses listed. It is, therefore, relatively easy to calculate the percentage of courses that no longer have vacancies. Now there may be reasons other than that the course is full for why the ‘no vacancies’ sign has been raised, but as a quick and crude measure it works. The number of courses can also vary from month to month, as providers either devise new routes or withdraw others.
Anyway, with those provisos, what is the state of play at the end of the first week of April 2022? Not good, is probably the best that can be said of the current situation. Overall, there has been little change in the percentage of course with no vacancies since a month ago, especially in the main subjects. The good news is that 58% of psychology ITE courses don’t have vacancies; the bad news is that 93% of physics courses do have vacancies. This is only 2% less than the figure at the start of March. Apart from in physical education, where only two thirds of courses still have vacancies, and that seems a high percentage for this time of year, most secondary subjects still have around four out of five courses showing vacancies.
Perhaps even more worrying is the fact that 84% of courses for intending primary school teachers still have vacancies. In part, this might be due to the plethora of such course on offer from multiple providers. However, in the past it would be expected that most courses would be full before April.
Of course, one drawback with this analysis is that it isn’t apparent as to whether courses have either just one vacancy that has been kept for a really well-qualified applicant or many vacancies. Such information would no doubt be useful to applicants.
The next two months are likely to see few final year students applying for courses as they focus on the completion of their degree courses, and the majority of applicants will come from career switchers or older graduates that have taken time out of the labour market.
New graduates remain a vital source of trainees, and it is to be hoped that after the degree results are announced there will be an uptake of interest in teaching as a career from that group. If not, this could be a really challenging year for providers: 2023 would then be a difficult labour market for schools.
There is little point comparing 2022 with 2021, as the covid pandemic resulted in very little activity in the teacher job market during the first three months of 2021.
So, how to explain this year’s surge in vacancies, and what might be the consequences?
Is the surge down to schools catching up vacancies not advertised last year; is it – at least in the secondary sector – down to increased pupil numbers; might private schools be recruiting more pupils from overseas and, hence need more teachers; could TeachVac be better are recording or even over-recording vacancies than in the past? I asked the team to check on the last point, and since most of them have been entering vacancies for several years, and we haven’t changed their way of working, it seems unlikely as a reason for the large increase in vacancies.
On the other side of the equation, could the increase in recorded vacancies be down to more teachers quitting schools in England, either to take up tutoring; to teach overseas or to either reduce their hours or even retire completely? Since we don’t have exit interviews, we will have to wait for the DfE to match teacher identify numbers for those moving within the state system and retiring with a pension and then conjecture what has happened to the remainder of leavers?
As to the consequences, regular readers of this blog will know what will come next because various posts since the ITT Census appeared in December have already been discussing the nature of the recruitment round for September 2022 and January 2023.
The table earlier in this post shows English and mathematics with relatively low increases. Perhaps schools feel that with the change in Ministerial team last autumn the focus on the EBacc subjects might have reduced. If so, might the White Paper provisions see an increase in vacancies in these subjects after Easter?
The increase in leadership vacancies needs further investigation in order to see which sector, and which of the leadership posts; head, deputy or assistant head are most affected by the increase or whether it is a general increase.
Design and technology, business, and to some extent computing are subjects that the government has under-played in its various attempts to increase interest in teaching as a career. Schools still want teachers in these subjects, and the government must help them fill the vacancies.
With many subjects not even meeting the DfE’s indicative target for the need for teachers on teacher preparation routes in 2022, the remainder of the recruitment round may well be a real challenge for many schools.
There is one other possibility, and that is the notion of schools bringing forward recruitment this year, so the peak will have been in March rather than in late April, as has been the normal practice in past years. If so, April will be a lean month for those that put off job hunting until then, unless schools have been unable to fill some of the 33,000 vacancies, and there is a string of re-advertisements this month and next.
TeachVac has a number of different reports to allow schools, local authorities, recruitment agencies and anyone else interested in trends in the labour market in real-time to track the behaviour of the market in anything for real-time to monthly. Email the staff using enquiries@oxteachserv.com for details.
Despite the extra week compared with last year, overall candidate numbers at 23,264 are below the 27,170 cited as being domiciled in England in the March 2021 UCAS data. In reality, the DfE’s 23,264 includes around 3,000 domiciled outsides of England, including 514 from Northern Ireland and 2,000 from the EEA plus ‘rest of the world’. So, the domiciled in England number is perhaps no more than 23,500 at best. This would be more than 3,000 below the March 2021 number. Not good news.
Equally disturbing is that the decline in candidates from across the age ranges, with a notable decline in the 25 to 29 age group from 5,900 in 2021 to 4,684 this March. These are often career switchers dissatisfied with their initial career choice after graduation, and choosing teaching as a second career. One of the smaller reductions is in the youngest age group of those age 21 and under, where this year’s number is 4,227 compared with 4,490 in March 2021.
This year, there 6,525 men have applied to become a teacher, compared with 7,620 in March 2021. Female applicants are down from 18,930 to 16,525 for the same comparative period. Last year, by March 2021, 680 men had been ‘placed’ or what is now termed ‘recruited’. This year, 234 have been recruited by March. Fortunately, only 1,515 men has been unsuccessful so far with their applications, along with 2,619 of the 16,525 women.
Applications, as opposed to candidates, are down from 79,790 in March 2021 to 61,755 this year. Higher Education has had 29,566 applications this year compared with 37,050 in March 2021. Not surprisingly, apprenticeship applications are up from 1,680 last year to 2,397 this year. However, the School Direct salaried route only has 3,618 applications compared with 6,460 in 2021. Only 14 have been recruited to this route compared with 40 placed by March 2021. SCITT numbers at 8,458 compared with 9,490 seem more buoyant than the other school-based routes.
Providers across England are reporting lower regional numbers for applications, with London applications down from 16,740 to 14,277 and in the South East from 10,540 to 7,605. Only in the Yorkshire and The Humber Region does the fall seem smaller, at 7,052 compared with 7,980 in March 2021.
These number make for grim reading in a month where TeachVac recorded record numbers of vacancies for teachers posted by schools across England. The aims of the White Paper published earlier this week cannot be met if there are not enough teachers. I still think the NfER prediction for physics that less than 20% of the target number would be reached is alarming, but it is almost certain that the target will be missed for another year, and not only in physics, but also in a range of other subjects.
After 12 years in power at Westminster, a solution to the teacher supply problem must be found by the present government.
Regular readers of this blog that listened to this webinar will have learned about some interesting data from Jack Worth’s presentation, not least the effect of bursaries on recruitment into training.
Here are some of my reflections
Keep in Touch Scheme
Absolutely needed. I drafted an idea for such a scheme earlier this year.
Part-time and flexible working
Good idea, but only if it increases recruitment. Needs research into balance between those working full-time and those only working part-time and effects on pupils and school ethos. Still, it is a better option than a procession of supply teachers.
Diversity and protected characteristics
It is 25 years this year since a Minister at the Department first addressed a conference on attracting a wider range of individuals into teaching. I have produced two significant reports for government and one for a teacher association during that time, both highlighted the issues that were discussed today. London is doing better than the rest of the country, but ‘young, White and female and able-bodied’ still seems to characterise the majority of those accepted into teaching. Some groups still find it disproportionally hard to become a teacher. There is a need to review where ITT places are located in relation to under-represented groups, and what happens if a particular group applies in large numbers for a particular course?
Here are some issues not mentioned this afternoon
Middle leadership and teacher shortages – discussed in the previous post on this blog
Teaching as a global profession – good or bad for recruitment into schools. No mention of iQTS this afternoon.
Tutoring as a career alternative to teaching or combined with flexible working in schools?
Many years ago, I wondered whether groups of teachers could band together to increase their pay by offering their services not as employees but as consultants. A group could take on teaching contracts alongside tutoring, delivery of professional development and creation of teaching resources as well as adult training and research to provide a varied career. The contract could specify the delivery but not the person delivering it. However, most people that enter teaching aren’t entrepreneurial, so such an idea probably wouldn’t work.
Underlying all the points being made during the webinar was the issue of the free market in teaching. Teachers can decide where they want to teach and if lucky can be paid a bursary to train to teach in a private school. As one speaker said, and has been apparent whenever there is a teacher shortage, teachers are more likely to end up in ‘good’ schools rather than challenging schools when demand exceeds the supply of teachers. Unless there is a change of attitude, levelling up is an impossible dream or a political con trick.
Should we link training places to schools on an expanded Teach First model whereby entrants to training are linked to schools and paid a salary from day one with pension contribution on top. Preparation, like the famous Project X of UCLA, should be linked to the demands of teaching in challenging schools and not how to teach in successful schools.
Finally, the new model of mentoring reminds me of what were once called Advisory Teachers. Mentoring might work better if the issue of the Middle Tier had been worked out rather than in the same disjoined way that school placements are created. This is another area where a discussion of free market versus planned provision might be useful.
It will be interesting to see what the White Paper has to say on any or all of these issues. However, White Papers can often identify problems, but may not lead to solutions.
John Howson 