Tag Archives: teachers

No Tsunami of Applications

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Earlier today UCAS released the first data on the 2021 recruitment round for postgraduate teacher preparation courses. The data are for applications up to the 16th November. Last year the data were for Monday 18th November 2019. In addition, there are applications through the DfE’s new service for which no data are yet available.

Now, it is always dangerous to read too much into the first month’s figures, but thirty years of looking at the numbers does allow me to make some observations.

Firstly, the increase in applicants domiciled in England, from 6,290 in 2019 to 7,420 in 2020, does not include large increases in applicants from the younger age groups, and  is skewed towards applicants domiciled in the London Areas.

Change in applicant numbers by age of applicant

Age        2020 round         2021 round         change

21 and

Under   1510                       1550                           40

22             970                       1040                           70

23             630                         730                         100

24             420                         570                         150

25-29     1200                       1490                         290

30-39       940                       1160                         220

40+           620                         890                         270

All           6290                       7420                       1130

Source UCAS Reports A 2019 and 2020 November data

For example, in the North East, applicants in November 2019 totalled 380. This November, the number is 390. In London the total was 890 in 2019, and is 1,300 this November. Similarly, in the South East Region, the increase is from 910 to 1,150. So, over half of the increase in applicants is accounted for by just two regions in England.

Although early days, should we be concerned that the number of male applicants aged 21 or under, final year undergraduates, has dropped from 360 last November to 300 this year? One to watch as the number of men over 40 applying has increased from 160 to 250. Overall, there are just fewer than 200 more male applicants this year compared to last year at this point in time.

More applicants means more applications, and the total increased from 17,840 in November 2019 to 21,710 this November. Again, as expected, London has done well, with an increase from 2,740 applications by last November to 4,120 this November. In the North East applications only rose from 1,090 to 1,110.

Both primary and secondary sectors have benefitted from the increase in applicants. Applications for primary sector courses are up from 7,980 to 9,890, and for secondary courses, from 9,860 to 11,790.

All types of provider have seen increases, but one of the smallest increases is in secondary SCITT applications, up from 1,320 to 1,360.

Almost all subjects have seen an increase in applications – data on applicants by subject isn’t published in the main reports.

Arts and humanities subjects has seen some of the largest increases in applications.  Even Physics has 240 applications this year, compared with 180 at this point in 2019. Art has seen applications double from 240 to 540, and even Design and Technology has 190 applications this year compared with 140 in November 2019. But, this might mean an increase an applicants from 50 last year to no more than 70 this year. Still, an increase is to be welcomed.

How long will this increase in interest in teaching last? There has been an article in SchoolsWeek recently suggesting it might be short-lived. After the start of the financial crisis it took just three years before teaching was starting to struggle to attract applicants to the profession. This time, with the pay freeze, who knows? More thought when the next set of data are published.

Report to the APPG Teaching Profession November meeting

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This report to the APPG notes the state of the labour market for teachers during September and October; a report from the EPI on men and teaching and the section of the Migration Advisory committee Report that dealt with teaching as a career.

Teacher Labour market – current thoughts

Teacher Shortage over: well almost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seealso:. https://www.nfer.ac.uk/media/4143/the_impact_of_covid_19_on_initial_teacher_training.pdf

The data on vacancies recorded during September and October 2020

The recorded level of vacancies during October was around 30% below the number recorded during October 2019 with less than 4,000 vacancies recorded during October this year compared with more than 5,000 during October 2019.

As with other months this autumn, primary vacancies have been holding up better than those posted by secondary schools with the vacancies across the primary sector down by only some 13%. In the secondary sector, English, down by 50% on October 2019 and mathematics, down by more than 45% are amongst the subjects recording some of the largest declines in vacancy totals. By contrast, music has only recorded a fall of around 14% and art a fall of 24%. However, with not even 150 vacancies between the two subjects, these are not major recruiters of teachers.

Traditionally, the end of October marks the conclusion of the annual recruitment round. Most vacancies appearing from now onwards will normally be geared towards appointments for September. In this case that will be September 2021. In a normal year there are few vacancies advertised for an April start. It is too early to tell whether 2021 will be different in that respect.

Leadership vacancies remain another bright spot in an otherwise challenging recruitment market for job seekers. Head teacher vacancies have remained at very similar levels to October 2019. While there have been slightly fewer deputy and assistant head teacher vacancies across the secondary sector, this has been offset by higher vacancy levels in the primary sector for posts at these levels.

Most notable at this time of year is the high percentage of temporary and maternity leave vacancies advertised in the primary sector. During October 202, some 20% of recorded primary vacancies were listed as a result of a teacher taking maternity leave and a further 28% were listed as temporary positions, some of which may also have been as a result of a teacher taking maternity leave. Overall, only just over half of the primary posts were offered as permanent positions during October 2020.

Although the percentage of vacancies resulting from a teacher taking maternity leave was similar in the secondary sector, at 195 of October vacancies, there were far fewer temporary vacancies advertised. Such vacancies only accounted for 10% of the total vacancies during October. This meant that permanent vacancies accounted for more than 70% of vacancies in the secondary sector during October. A much higher percentage than in the primary sector.

Men in teaching EPI Report

EPI, the Education Policy Institute, published a short report entitled ‘Trends in the Diversity of Teachers in England’ that is largely about gender diversity in teaching. The report brings up to date some of the data that can be found in m post on john Howson’s blog from April 2020 at:https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2020/04/09/are-new-graduate-entrants-to-teaching-still-predominantly-young-white-and-female/

Interestingly, although the report does put the issue into the wider context of the attractiveness of teaching as a career, and the lack of women taking degrees in some subjects such as physics, it doesn’t really consider the fact that some of the change may be down to teaching also becoming relatively less attractive to women, especially primary school teaching.

The EPI paper, while revealing the genuine concern about the issue, doesn’t point out that at the end of the 1990s when the economy was also doing well, the percentage of male graduates accepted into teaching through the UCAS graduate entry system (then administered by the GTTR) was as low as it is now and possibly even lower in the primary sector.

Percentage of men accepted onto graduate teacher preparation courses

1998       31%

1999       30%

2000       29%

Source GTTR annual Report for 2000

The EPI paper is also correct to draw attention to the fact that men generally decide to apply later in the recruitment round than women, suggesting possibly that the attraction of teaching as a career is less strong for some male applicants. This is possibly also borne out by the higher departure rates from teaching for men, although some may remain in teaching, just outside of state-funded schools.

Linking the evidence to wage rates, where public sector workers have not fared well compared to other graduates in the South East, is interesting but doesn’t explain why Inner London schools have the second highest percentage of male teachers. Perhaps, this is the Teach First effect?

So what might be done? EPI have some good suggestions. In taking over the admissions to teacher preparation courses, the DfE might want to look at how the process across the year might be more neutral in terms of encouraging diversity among both applicants and those placed.

However, one issue has always been that some course providers attract a disproportionately high percentage of applicants from certain groups. Male Black African applicants at one time largely only applied for places on four courses, and some early years courses rarely if ever saw a male applicant.

Finally, the media has a role to play in stereotyping certain careers. The anguish of those that suffered child abuse, mostly at the hands of men, may have deterred some men from choosing careers such as teaching.

But, that’s not something just looking at statistics as both EPI and my blog does, can tell you.  As the EPI paper concludes, ‘it is important to understand the root cause of why more male graduates don’t choose teaching.’

Migration Advisory Committee – teaching conclusions

Teachers of all Modern Languages struggling to find a teaching post may be surprised to discover that the government’s Migration Advisory Committee believes that their subject should be added to the list of shortage subjects. The Report from the MAC https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/922019/SOL_2020_Report_Final.pdf tackles the issue of secondary teaching on pages 606 onwards.

For anyone familiar with recruitment patterns in teaching, using data on job posting in August collected by a company called Burning Glass may raise some eyebrows. August is after all the least representative month for teaching vacancies, except perhaps in Scotland where school return from their summer break up to two weeks earlier than in England and Wales. Previously, Mandarin was on the list of shortage subjects, but not teachers of other languages.

TeachVac has recorded fewer vacancies for teachers of modern languages this year compared with last year since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, so the data from Burning Glass seems curious to say the least.

There is no mention of business studies as a shortage subject in the MAC report even though TeachVac has consistently pointed out that the subject tops the list of subjects where schools have found recruitment a challenge. Perhaps there is a pecking order of subjects that typifies their status. Following the Prime Minister’s announcement this summer about a focus on skills, it is even more difficult to see why business studies is not even considered by the MAC in their report.

The fact that the MAC doesn’t even seem to have taken into account the DfE’s own vacancy site is also curious. As a result the outcome of the data analysis on secondary teaching must be open to discussion.

The MAC decision seems based on the fact that The APPG on Modern Languages was concerned about shortages and that an above average number of EEA nationals made up part of those students on teacher preparation courses. The fact that these courses filled more of their places than say, design & technology isn’t mentioned.

The MAC noted that: We recommend, in addition, adding all modern foreign language teachers within SOC code 2314 (secondary education teaching professionals) to the SOL. Overall the occupation has a relatively low RQF6+ shortage indicator rank and is less reliant on migrant employees than the UK average. Statistics show a gradual rise in the number of entrants to ITT (England only). However, there is also some evidence of shortage, particularly for MFL teachers, a subject more reliant of EEA employees. Page 610

Interestingly, the MAC see no reason to add either primary teacher or FE lecturers to the list of shortage subjects. The former is understandable, the latter strange in view of some of the skills areas on the list. Did the MAC ask whether there was any difficulties in recruiting lecturers in these areas? On the face of their report it seems they treat FE like primary teaching as a single sector, whereas secondary teaching was looked at in more detail down to subject level.

New book

Exploring Teacher Recruitment and Retention

This book is sub-titled Contextual Challenges from International Perspectives, and is jointly edited by Tanya Ovenden-Hope and Rowena Passy, and was published by Routledge on the 2nd October. The ISBN is 9780367076450

£3 a vacancy

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Finding, matching and linking teacher vacancies to interested applicants for just £3. This seems unbelievable, especially if you add in all the benefits of the data collected to help with expanding our knowledge of the teacher labour market.

But, less than £3 a vacancy is the cost TeachVac’s accountants are telling me as Chair that we spent in the school year 2019-2020 handling more than 50,000 vacancies during that time. Adding teacher capacity comes at negligible cost to the system, and with well over 90% coverage of schools across England, in both state and private sectors, and a five year track record of success, the brand is now well established in the market and offers great value for money.

However, to some extent, TeachVac has been a victim of its own success, the DfE now has a site that carries a fraction of the jobs TeachVac finds. The DfE site also requires schools to do far more work to upload jobs to the site than Teachvac requires.

So it is free to the DfE, free to teachers, but not as free to schools as Teachvac. Indeed, assuming there are development and hosting costs it isn’t free to the DfE. Does it cost the taxpayer more than £3 per vacancy?

School leaders are still happy to see schools spend millions of pounds on recruitment, while complaining that education is under-funded. I don’t subscribe to the argument that education funding must help prop up private sector profits, and I wonder why others with more authority than I will ever have are happy to turn a ‘Nelsonic’ eye to such expenditure.

TeachVac’s latest accounts will soon be visible to all on the Companies House website. They are filed by Oxford Teacher Services Ltd, the holding company. If you would like a sight of the latest accounts before they appear there, do make contact and I will be happy to send you a set.

We have come a long way since the days of hot metal and the moves, firstly from column inches to display advertising, and then to the introduction of colour into vacancy advertising. Shifting recruitment advertising to the web has offered opportunities, not fully exploited by the profession, to cut costs and innovate.

TeachVac has been happy to show the way, and is now looking to expand its expertise gained with teacher vacancies into non-teaching roles. Who knows, we might be able to offer all jobs in schools across England for less than a quarter of a million pounds: now there’s a thought.

Of course if you want to sponsor the site, TeachVac is happy to engage in discussions with you. Imagine, 50,000 vacancies brought to say 60,000 job seekers across the year and around the world as teaching has become a global profession. You can do the arithmetic.

I am proud of what the small team on the Isle of Wight have created over the past five years. Please tell us how we can do even better.

World Statistics Day

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Today we recognise the power of statistics for both good and evil. Many years ago, when I was teaching geography in a school, I would ask my A level groups to at least audit, if not actually take, a course in statistics. As well as informing their general education, the course also helped with their understanding of the geography syllabus of the 1970s that was rapidly changing from mere descriptive and clerical tasks to a more analytical approach to the issue of ‘place’.

At the same time I was persuading my Year 7s to play games. The farming game and the railway game were two favourites. Both helped instil collaborative learning skills plus discussion about issues such as risk and probability.

One spin off from this interest in statistics was the ability to help students remember that temperature was continuous and rainfall intermittent, and thus one was represented by a line on the graph and the other by columns. There is an interesting debate to be had about when discrete data becomes continuous because of the length of the time series? Good question for today.

One of the earliest research projects I ever encountered was conducted by a lecturer at LSE who was counting the number of phone calls between different settlements in South Africa and creating some form of density map. The clerical work, pre-computers, took a whole summer. Now it might take just a few minutes. However, working through the data, town by town, created a feeling for ‘rightness’ that can be lost when a computer spills out the results. The ability to estimate when a number is in the right relationship to those around it is still a key skill.

Playing with information, not statistics, led me into the world of teacher supply via the database of leadership vacancies I started in the early 1980s. Later today, I will participate in a call set up by civil servants to discuss the replacement for the Teacher Supply Model. I think this will be the fourth or fifth iteration of such models to decide how many teachers we need to train each year. Watch out for more on this in a later post.

The School Workforce Census is a great improvement on what went before. However, despite the publicity for the new approach to displaying government statistics, I have some reservations. Perhaps, this is just my age showing, and I need to find some YouTube videos to help me learn new skills.

Understanding data in all forms has never been a more important prerequisite for those making decisions about our lives as the present pandemic has clearly demonstrated. A classical Oxbridge education might have been valuable as a foundation of a career in politics during previous generations. Surely, it is not adequate for leaders in the modern world.

Let us celebrate World Statistics Day by counting the number of different statistics we see during the course of the day. More than we might imagine.

Men and teaching: only a career in a recession?

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EPI, the Education Policy Institute, has today published a short report entitled ‘Trends in the Diversity of Teachers in England’ that is largely about gender diversity in teaching. The report brings up to date some of the data that can be found in my post on this blog from April this year https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2020/04/09/are-new-graduate-entrants-to-teaching-still-predominantly-young-white-and-female/

Interestingly, although the report does put the issue into the wider context of the attractiveness of teaching as a career, and the lack of women taking degrees in some subjects such as physics, it doesn’t really consider the fact that some of the change may be down to teaching also becoming relatively less attractive to women, especially primary school teaching.

The EPI paper, while revealing the genuine concern about the issue, doesn’t point out that at the end of the 1990s when the economy was also doing well, the percentage of male graduates accepted into teaching through the UCAS graduate entry system (then administered by the GTTR) was as low as it is now, and possibly even lower in the primary sector.

Percentage of men accepted onto graduate teacher preparation courses

1998       31%

1999       30%

2000       29%

Source GTTR annual Report for 2000

The EPI paper is also correct to draw attention to the fact that men generally decide to apply later in the recruitment round than women, suggesting possibly that the attraction of teaching as a career is less strong for some male applicants. This is possibly also borne out by the higher departure rates from teaching for men, although some may remain in teaching, just outside of state-funded schools.

Linking the evidence to wage rates, where public sector workers have not fared well compared to other graduates in the South East, is interesting but doesn’t explain why Inner London schools have the second highest percentage of male teachers. Perhaps, this is the Teach First effect?

I also wrote about this issue during my period as a TES commentator. There was a Hot Data column in April 1999 entitled ‘Male primary teachers still elusive’ and in one of my final On the Map pieces for the TES, headed ‘Female Teachers, schools remain a woman’s domain’, published in July 2010, I looked at some international evidence. (Incidentally, at the TES, I never wrote the headlines for my pieces).

In September this year, I again headlined the issue of gender in a wider post considering the evidence from the recent OECD Education Indicators at a Glance publication https://johnohowson.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/oecd-education-indicators-at-a-glance-2020-edition/

So what might be done? EPI have some good suggestions. In taking over the admissions to teacher preparation courses, the DfE might want to look at how the process across the year might be more neutral in terms of encouraging diversity among both applicants and those placed.

However, one issue has always been that some course providers attract a disproportionately high percentage of applicants from certain groups. Male Black African applicants at one time largely only applied for places on four courses, and some early years courses rarely if ever saw a male applicant.

Finally, the media has a role to play in stereotyping certain careers. The anguish of those that suffered child abuse, mostly at the hands of men, may have deterred some men from choosing careers such as teaching.

But, that’s not something just looking at statistics, as both EPI and my blog does, can tell you.  As the EPI paper concludes, ‘it is important to understand the root cause of why more male graduates don’t choose teaching.’

BA fly last passenger 747

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Why is the news that BA has retired their remaining passenger fleet of Boeing’s iconic 747 ‘Jumbo’ jets worth a post on an education blog? Mainly because I have often used this plane as an example of technological change.

Children born in the era of the first powered flights made by aviation pioneers at the start of the last century retired from work at about the time when the 747 started flying. From canvas and wood planes held together by glue and cords to a passenger plane with two decks and a range unimaginable to those early pioneers, all in less than one lifetime.

Using this example has always prompted me to ask educationalists what changes succeeding generations will experience in their lifetimes. The generation born when the BBC was broadcasting the programme ‘The chips are down’, a TV documentary that brought the concept of semi-conductors to a mass audience and heralded the move of commuters from air-conditioned rooms into homes, and eventually our pockets as well, are now parents whose own children are often well advanced along their own path to adulthood. What changes will they experience in their lifetimes?

Today, there is a news story that the next generation of mobile devices we used to call phones will have inside them chips based upon 5nm technology. Nm refers to nanometres, each of which is one billionth of a metre. According to the BBC a nanometre is roughly the speed a human hair grows every second. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54510363

Education has not been known for the speed of its changes. However, this year, the response to the pandemic has seen more change than perhaps at any time since slates were replaced by paper.

Hopefully, think tanks and politicians are now thinking about the future shape of education and the extent to which change will continue to be driven both by the decisions of individual schools and even teachers to the level of thinking about decision-making that needs to be taken at a national level in order to ensure all children can participate in the same education journey through schooling. Access to technology has become a real issue again for the education sector.

Technology ought also to help everyone work to make a planet that continues to be habitable. If it doesn’t, then the future for those being educated today may be very different.

The 747 was a noisy, dirty and expensive plane to fly. Those issues weren’t a concern when it was designed. Today, they are very much an issue.

Let me finish by asking how much greener is your school than it was a generation ago?

Not the party we expected

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Follow this link to an article I have written for the Church Times on schools and the pandemic. It was written in early September.

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2020/25-september/features/features/education-150-years-of-state-schools-not-the-party-we-expected

Teacher Shortage over: well almost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MFL teachers in short supply according to Migration Advisory Committee

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Teachers of all Modern Languages struggling to find a teaching post may be surprised to discover that the government’s Migration Advisory Committee believes that their subject should be added to the list of shortage subjects. Today’s Report from the MAC https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/922019/SOL_2020_Report_Final.pdf tackles the issue of secondary teaching on pages 606 onwards.

For anyone familiar with recruitment patterns in teaching, using data on job posting in August collected by a company called Burning Glass may raise some eyebrows. August is after all the least representative month for teaching vacancies, except perhaps in Scotland where school return from their summer break up to two weeks earlier than in England and Wales. Previously, Mandarin was on the list of shortage subjects, but not teachers of other languages.

TeachVac has recorded fewer vacancies for teachers of modern languages this year compared with last year since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, so the data from Burning Glass seems curious to say the least.

There is no mention of business studies as a shortage subject in the MAC report even though TeachVac has consistently pointed out that the subject tops the list of subjects where schools have found recruitment a challenge. Perhaps there is a pecking order of subjects that typifies their status. Following the Prime Minister’s announcement earlier today on skills, it is even more difficult to see why business studies is not even considered by the MAC in their report.

The fact that the MAC doesn’t even seem to have taken into account the DfE’s own vacancy site is also curious. As a result the outcome of the data analysis on secondary teaching must be open to discussion.

The MAC decision seems based on the fact that The APPG on Modern Languages was concerned about shortages and that an above average number of EEA nationals made up part of those students on teacher preparation courses. The fact that these courses filled more of their places than say, design & technology isn’t mentioned.

The MAC noted that: We recommend, in addition, adding all modern foreign language teachers within SOC code 2314 (secondary education teaching professionals) to the SOL. Overall the occupation has a relatively low RQF6+ shortage indicator rank and is less reliant on migrant employees than the UK average. Statistics show a gradual rise in the number of entrants to ITT (England only). However, there is also some evidence of shortage, particularly for MFL teachers, a subject more reliant of EEA employees. Page 610

I wonder whether the government will accept this recommendation.

Interestingly, the MAC see no reason to add either primary teacher or FE lecturers to the list of shortage subjects. The former is understandable, the latter strange in view of some of the skills areas on the list. Did the MAC ASK whether there was any difficulties in recruiting lecturers in these areas? On the face of their report it seems they treat FE like primary teaching as a single sector whereas secondary teaching was looked at in more detail down to subject level.

OECD Education Indicators at a Glance: 2020 Edition

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Each year the OECD brings together the most recent data about education systems. Originally it was just data from the OECD countries, but now the scope has widened to include some other countries. This allows for both a EU23 country average and in some cases a G20 average number to be calculated in many of the tables.

In this blog post, I look at three sets of data; age of teachers in primary and lower secondary sectors; the percentage of female teachers in these sectors and some data about class sizes.

The data for the home nations is aggregated into a United Kingdom statistics. This is despite, as pointed out in a previous post, education is a devolved activity and each constituent part of the United Kingdom takes its own decisions on education policy. However, they are not separate countries, and are viewed no differently than either German Land or French Departments by the OECD.

On the ratio of students to teaching staff in 2018, the United Kingdom still has one of the largest ratios in the table for the primary sector, at 20 pupils per teacher. Only The Russian Federation, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, of the nations included in the table, have larger class sizes. By comparison, the OECD average is 15 pupils per teacher, and the EU23 average is even smaller at just 13 pupils per teacher.  The United Kingdom figure comes after including the smaller class sizes often found in swathes of rural Scotland and Wales.

In the lower secondary table, the United Kingdom performs better. The average falls to 16 pupils per teacher, compared with an OECD average of 13 and the EU23 average of 11 pupils per teacher. Although the imbalance between staffing is of long-standing, it is smaller than a generation ago. It is to be hoped that as policymakers fully understand the importance of early education the gap will continue to close between the staffing ratios funded for younger and older pupils.

On the age distribution of teachers, the United Kingdom had the system with the highest percentage of teachers below the age of 30 working in the primary sector at 29% of the teaching force, and one of the lowest percentage of teachers older than 50 in the sector.  Young teachers are more recently prepared for the classroom, but less likely to remain there than older teachers.

The large percentage may partly be down to the rise in the birth rate that required more teachers to be hired as the increased number of pupils reached school age. By contrast, many western European countries, including Finland, had less than ten per cent of their primary teaching force in the under-30 age bracket in 2018.

The position is similar in the lower secondary workforce, with the United Kingdom again leading the way at 22%, with the second highest percentage of teachers in the youngest age grouping: only Turkey had a higher percentage. Indeed, the EU23 average was only nine per cent of lower secondary teachers under the age of thirty in 2018.

On gender, although we tend to think of teaching these days as a profession where women vastly outnumber men, and that is true, the data revealed that in 2018 the United Kingdom was close to the OECD average of 83% female teachers among teachers under thirty in the primary sector. The EU23 average for this group was 85% ,with a UK figure of 84%.  By contrast, in Austria and Italy more than 90% of their teacher under the age of 30 were female. In Denmark, the percentage was only 58%.

In the lower secondary sector, the international averages were a 68% of teachers under thirty being female. The United Kingdom were again similar to the averages with a figure of 66% for female teachers as a proportion of teachers under the age of thirty. Denmark again had one of the lowest percentages, but Italy had a much higher percentage of male teacher in the lower secondary sector.

There is more to be said about the difference in survival rates in teaching for men and women, and the relative lack of women in leadership positions, even after several decades of equal opportunities legislation.

Data on teachers’ ethnic backgrounds would also be useful, not least to know where and how well it is collected across the OECD countries.

The data was collected in a period of calm before the pandemic storm hit the world. What these numbers will look like in a decade if employment opportunities change is in the realm of speculation. Might the patterns be very different or might the journey to equal opportunities really be more firmly embedded in the labour market than ever before?