TeachVac updates website with vacancy counter

Posted on August 6, 2021 by John Howson

Teachers can now see at a glance how many vacancies TeachVac has each day. www.teachvac.co.uk The site displays an overall total and the number of vacancies in some key subject areas and the primary sector. Of course, as it is August, vacancy numbers are low, so there is also the total for the year to date.

TeachVac is geared to the needs of teachers. As a result, it only carries teaching jobs. The DfE vacancy site, for instance, has both teaching and non-teaching vacancies. Earlier this week 146 of the 262 vacancies listed on the DfE vacancy site weren’t teaching jobs. Many were for Teaching Assistants, but there were also a plethora of other types of job. There were 110 teaching jobs plus six duplicated jobs. So, less than half the vacancies were for teaching posts. By comparison, TeachVac had 507 live teaching jobs listed by schools across England on the same day

Teachers want a site where they can receive the widest possible range of teaching posts that meet their needs both in terms of location and sills. I am proud of the achievements of TeachVac during the years since it was set up to demonstrate a new way of linking teachers with the jobs they were seeking, whether as a newly qualified teacher; an existing teacher changing schools or seeking promotion of someone wanting to return to teaching.

TeachVac is recording record monthly visits and ‘hits’ on the website as the message spreads among teachers and schools. At this time of year, schools are looking to renew existing deals with other listing services. They should ask whether the price represents good value for money.

TeachVac has also enabled me, as its Chair, to produce blogs using the data, such as the recent posting about whether there are fewer jobs or just fewer re-advertisements? As that post mentioned, a unique job reference number would provide much better data about the functioning of the labour market for teachers. I have campaigned, so far without any success on that issue as with the issue of making the term ‘teacher’ a reserved occupation that can only be used by those with Qualified Teacher Status.

If you haven’t tried TeachVac yet, then please do so. The team on the Isle of Wight would love to have your feedback.

Fewer jobs or just fewer re-advertisement?

Posted on August 4, 2021 by John Howson

Without unique job reference numbers, keeping track of changes in the labour market for teachers requires some careful detective work. While most vacancies are probably filled from the first advertisement, some are not, causing the post to be re-advertised. Some posts are also advertised in several different locations, usually without a school considering whether such a practice is cost effective.

There are also some schools that advertise ‘talent banking’ vacancies where there is probably not a job behind the advertisement, but the school can access details of potential applicants when a vacancy does arise. This is a common practice in the recruitment world, and can mislead those seeking to understand how many teaching vacancies there really are in a year.

TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk now has the data from the first seven months of 2021 for the teacher labour market in England. Overall, vacancies recorded are up from 42,700 to 45,400 for the first seven months of this year compared with the same period in 2020. However, there are marked differences between the sectors. Primary vacancies are up by 40% from 10,000 to 14,000 whereas secondary headline vacancy numbers are down by some 7%.

But, are secondary vacancies really down, or is it just that more vacancies are being filled at first advertisement? Business Studies, one of the subjects largely ignored by governments that normally struggles to find sufficient applicants registered a 2% increase in 2021, against the overall downward trend. Most subjects with increases this year are minority subjects such as economic; health and Social Care; Law; psychology and sociology. However Design and Technology has experienced a similar 2% increase to that of business studies and biology has recorded a 3% increase. Interestingly, physical education has also seen a 2% increase.

More spectacular are the 18% decrease in vacancies in mathematics and the 15% in general science posts. (Specific physics vacancies fell by 7%). English vacancies were down by 11%.

In order to gauge how much of the deduction might be down to less need to re-advertise, vacancies for teachers of mathematics posted by school in the London Region were reviewed for the January to July period in each year between 2018 and 2021

	Total schools	Schools 2+ vacancies	Schools 4+ vacancies
2021	185	51%	10%
2020	181	52%	15%
2019	184	61%	23%
2018	155	57%	17%

Source: TeachVac

There are certainly fewer schools with more than one vacancy both this year and in 2020. The reduction in the percentage of schools with 4+ vacancies is even more marked. This might suggest that in the London Region there might be some credence to the theory that schools have found posts easier to fill since the pandemic struck. This despite the fact that the total number of schools posting at least one vacancy for a teacher of mathematics has remained consistent over the past three years at between 181 and 185 schools in both the state and independent sectors recorded as placing a vacancy for a teacher of mathematics.

Within London there are regional differences with South East London schools seemingly finding recruitment more of a challenge than schools north of the River Thames.

Job market still patchy

Posted on June 23, 2021 by John Howson

How easy have teachers looking for jobs this year found the labour market? The following table, taken from TeachVac data www.teachvac.co.uk for vacancies recorded between 1^st January and yesterday in the secondary sector for schools across England suggests demand is still below that witnessed in 2019 in many key subjects.

Subject	2019	2021	Percentage +/- (The nearest whole %)
Art	978	795	-19%
Business	840	842	+0%
Classics	97	108	+11%
Computer Science	1263	1237	-2%
Dance	92	61	-34%
Drama	496	435	-12%
DT	1812	1870	+3%
Economics	370	355	-4%
Engineering	57	74	+30%
English	4159	3028	-27%
Geography	1342	1149	-14%
Health and Social Care	167	190	+14%
History	1054	914	-13%
Humanities	417	337	-19%
Law	42	57	+36%
Mathematics	4712	3669	-22%
Media Studies	176	109	-38%
MFL	2125	1990	-6%
Music	886	796	-10%
Pastoral	259	214	-17%
PE	1383	1178	-15%
Philosophy	68	60	-12%
Psychology	307	441	+44%
RE	809	909	+12%
Science	5642	4245	-25%
–Biology	401	368	-8%
–Chemistry	515	427	-17%
–Physics	647	552	-15%
SEN	324	513	+58%
Sociology	124	169	+36%
Total	30001	25745	-14%

TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk analysis of teacher vacancies in 2021

Now, in some cases this may be because a better supply position, with more new teachers exiting preparation courses this year, resulting in fewer re-advertisements by schools. Without a dedicated job reference code – something I have been advocating for years – it is difficult to distinguish unfilled vacancies re-advertised from new vacancies except in specific categories such as a head of department or headteacher posts, where there is only one such post.

Nevertheless, the reduction in vacancies for mathematics teachers of 22%, and for science teachers of 25% does suggest a better balanced labour market than in 2019, when schools were suffering from the recruitment into training problems experienced in 2018. Interestingly, despite the fall in the birth rate, demand for teachers for the primary sector is buoyant this year.

One unknown, going forward, is how the global school market will respond to the pandemic over the next twelve months and whether or not teachers from England will once again be attracted to teach overseas in any significant numbers. Will there also be fewer EEA citizens willing and able to teach in England? Time will tell.

Still, at this point in time, schools can feel reasonably confident of filling late vacancies for September 2021 and vacancies for January 2022 in mot subjects in many parts of the country. There will be local shortages, but apart from some vocationally orientated subjects such as business studies and design ad technology, nationwide issues are unlikely to surface.

Freedom of Information Request

Posted on March 15, 2021 by John Howson

The DfE’s teaching vacancies web site has been in operation for some time now. Indeed, in the DfE’s evidence to the School Teachers Review Body (STRB) this year they state the following at paragraph 45:

We are also continuing to develop and improve our Teaching Vacancies service, which is a free, national jobs listing website designed to save schools money and deliver high quality candidates. With schools spending in the region of £75m on recruitment advertising and not always filling vacancies, there are very significant gains to be made in this area. Over 75% of schools in England 14 are now signed up to use the service and over half a million jobseekers visited Teaching Vacancies in 2020 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/967761/STRB_Written_Evidence_2021.pdf

On the face of it the site is doing well. Regular readers will know of my role as Chair of TeachVac, the job site matching teachers to jobs across England that pre-dated the DfE site. After reading the above paragraph, I wondered how the half a million jobseekers number was measured. For most of the time there has been no requirement to log-in and register to view vacancies on the DfE site, so was it just ‘hits’. In that case half a million might seem a low number over 12 months. I am not sure what the TES would claim, but TeachVac is in excess of 5 million ‘hits’ over the last twelve months and heading for 6 million for 2021.

The claim of 75% of schools registered with the DfE says nothing about how often they place vacancies on the site.

A casual glance at the around 1,500 vacancies shown as the total on the DfE site reveals a number of issues.

Firstly, not all vacancies are for teachers. Some are for teaching assistants and others for everything including cleaners, support staff, examination offers and cover supervisors. Secondly, not all vacancies are for posts in schools. Some are in Sixth form Colleges and other institutions not run under school regulations.

However, the most important issue is the number of unique posts on the DfE site. I raised this with the DfE directly recently, and have not yet had a explanation. As a result, I have tabled a Freedom of information request.

On the DfE vacancy site for teachers

How many of the published vacancies on 16^th March or nearest available date with data were duplicated.

What was the number of unique vacancies on that day for teachers in institutions operating under schools regulations displayed on the DfE Vacancy site after excluding Sixth Form Colleges, other Further Education institutions and any private sector institutions and posts not requiring a teacher such as Teaching Assistant, cleaner, Examinations Officer and cover supervisor? Vacancies providing services across MATs and not linked to a specific school should also be excluded from the total.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes to respond to the FOI request. Since the answer should be available at the press of a button, it surely should not take long for a response, even after it has no doubt had to be checked at several levels within the Department before being released.

Last week, it was reported to me that one vacancy appeared several times on the site. I have no objection to such a policy if the total refers to ‘unique’ vacancies and not to repeats of the same vacancy, as such an approach to the total might be construed as misleading as to the usefulness of the site.

As I have pointed out before, TeachVac consistently has more vacancies than the DfE site, and teachers wanting a job in either the state or private sector can find them on TeachVac, but not on the DfE site.

However, the largest mystery of all is why schools are still spending £75 million on recruitment advertising when there are better uses for the cash. Perhaps the teacher associations and those responsible for school governance and administration can tell me the answer as to why so much cash is being spent on recruitment advertising?

Feeling the strain?

Posted on August 31, 2020 by John Howson

After nearly 40 years of following trends in school leadership recruitment, I have rarely had to worry about what was happening during August. Indeed, for many years I used to spend the month compiling a detailed report on the labour market for senior staff during the previous school year for the NAHT.

However, this year, perhaps because of covid-19, there are signs that activity in the market for senior leaders has been a bit different to normal. Using data from TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk admittedly collected this morning, (although I don’t expect many schools in England to add new vacancies on a bank holiday), and not after the end of the month, there seems to have been an increase in advertised vacancies for both primary and secondary headships by schools in England this August.

In the primary sector, vacancies for headteacher posts recorded during August 2020 were 84, up from 57, in 2019, and 54, in 2018. Likewise, in the secondary sector, recorded headship vacancies were 16 in 2020, compared with just six in 2019, and 10 in 2018. Deputy Head vacancies increased, from 10 to 32, between last August and this year in the primary sector, and from just two last year to five vacancies this year in the secondary sector. There were eight assistant head vacancies in the primary sector this August, compared with just three recorded in August 2019.

Promoted posts are rarely seen in vacancies for the primary sector, and none were recorded this August. In the secondary sector, there were 38 this August, compared with 36 in 2019: little change.

For completeness, it is worth noting that classroom teacher vacancies also rose in the primary sector from 96 recorded in August 2019, to 129 recorded in 2020. However, the downward trend in the secondary sector job market continued, with just 223 recorded vacancies for classroom teachers this August, compared with 344 in August 2019.

What might account for this upward trend in headship vacancies? Well, TeachVac might be better at collecting vacancies form the smaller primary Multi Academy Trusts that last year. That might account for some of the difference. However, might some primary heads be feeling the strain of running a school during the exceptional period we have experienced since March 2020, and the start of the pandemic?

If this is the case, then the actions of government over the summer bode ill for the future. Could we see a growth in heads tendering their resignations for January or will they be prepared to carry on despite the requirements imposed upon them by government?

Vacancies advertised during September 2019 for headships were, 102 in the primary sector, and 44 in the secondary sector. These totals provide a benchmark by which to judge the number of vacancies in 2020.

It is also worth considering, at least in the primary sector, what the pool of potential new heads is like, and I may come back to that issue in another post. The key number is of deputy heads with perhaps at least five years of experience and, perhaps, under the age of fifty five.

Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy?

Posted on August 29, 2020 by John Howson

As someone that chairs a private limited company operating in the field of teacher recruitment, I always read the annual accounts published by the owners of the TES Group with interest. The latest, just released, provide details for the year up to the 31^st August 2019, so aren’t all that recent. Normally, the annual accounts for the previous year appear on the Companies House website sometime in the following May. However, the accounts for the year up to the 31^st August 2019 have only recently appeared.

The Group now files its overall Group accounts under the name of Tes Topco, for anyone interested in reading what has happened since the group was sold by one American Group to another.

I can sympathise with the directors. The bottom line for 2018-19 was a loss across the business, after everything, including finance costs, were taken into account, of some £67,000,000. That’s a chunky loss on revenue of less than £100 million, and was generated well before covid-19 affected the teacher recruitment market.

The ‘Attract’ part of the business – basically the on-line recruitment part of the Group, and once the jewel in the crown – registered a decline in turnover compared with the previous year, to around some £61,000,000. It isn’t possible to work out how much of this revenue came from schools in England, how much from schools elsewhere in the United Kingdom and how much for overseas.

However, let’s say schools in England paid upwards of £40,000,000 for what they could obtain for free from either TeachVac or the DfE vacancy website. Interestingly, as far as the TES was concerned, point of sale advertising revenue continued to decline in favour of subscriptions by schools.

This part of the business is supported by the large pool of teachers visiting the site to hunt for a job. Now that teachers are not a scare commodity, will schools want to renew their subscriptions? What happens if jobseekers divert in large numbers to either the DfE site or TeachVac? Is they do, why would schools continue to use the services of the TES job board?

An interesting question is whether the loss per teacher incurred by Tes Topco is anywhere near the level incurred by TeachVac? At present, TeachVac costs less than £3 per vacancy advertised to operate. You can do the maths for the Tes on say £40 million in revenue and possibly, being generous, 70,000 vacancies advertised by schools in England in 2018-19.

Looking forward to the effects of covid-19 on schools, the accompanying report estimates a loss on the vacancy and supply teacher part of the business of some £8 million. This assumes, as at present is the case that schools return for the autumn term, and there is no more lockdown across the board. The latest announcements for the autumn about what might happen do try to protect schools, but I am not sure that these measures will encourage schools to enter the teacher recruitment market unless absolutely necessary.

If TeachVac costs £3 per vacancy, and the DfE can spend anything it likes to keep its vacancy site alive, what future is there for an expensive paid site in England, regardless of whether schools pay for each vacancy advertised or take out a subscription?

I wonder if there is now more value now in the other parts of Tes Topco’s business than in the ‘attract’ part, even though it still dominates the revenue stream for the business.

Government response to crisis predicted?

Posted on April 20, 2020 by John Howson

The Insight team’s article about the handling of the present emergency, written up in yesterday’s Sunday Times, must have made uncomfortable reading for some. However, a visitor to this blog this morning also reminded me of Dominic Cumming’s famous essay in the autumn of 2013 about the education system in England.

To quote just one paragraph:

The education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre. A tiny number, less than 1 percent, are educated in the basics of how the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ provides the ‘language of nature’ and a foundation for our scientific civilisation and only a small subset of that <1% then study trans-disciplinary issues concerning the understanding, prediction and control of complex nonlinear systems. Unavoidably, the level of one’s mathematical understanding imposes limits on the depth to which one can explore many subjects. For example, it is impossible to follow academic debates about IQ unless one knows roughly what ‘normal distribution’ and ‘standard deviation’ mean, and many political decisions, concerning issues such as risk, cannot be wisely taken without at least knowing of the existence of mathematical tools such as conditional probability. Only a few aspects of this problem will be mentioned.

I first used this in a blog post on the 13^th October 2013. I especially wonder whether the comment that

…. and many political decisions, concerning issues such as risk, cannot be wisely taken without at least knowing of the existence of mathematical tools such as conditional probability …

Might have come home to roost as the present outbreak bites ever deeper into national life? Why, for instance, is the government not commissioning the BBC to create a single on-line learning tool instead of setting up a competing organisation? All it needed was to ensure the BBC used UK technology to create the platform rather than to waste scare resources when we should be saving every penny we can.

On the same subject, those that have viewed my LinkedIn page will know of the graph demonstrating TeachVac is still well ahead of the DfE vacancy site in terms of teaching posts on offer. Why waste school staff time uploading to the DfE site when we can offer a more comprehensive solution.

Indeed, as Chair of TeachVac’s parent company, I would be willing to approve a free feed to the DfE site for the summer term to show what can be done.

Schools will need to cut costs in the future, and recruitment is not one that they should be expecting to spend lots of money on from now onward. However, until there is a single site carrying most teaching vacancies, schools will still want to try other methods.

The full text of Dominic Cummings essay was located at: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/804396/some-thoughts-on-education-and-political.pdf

Fewer teacher vacancies since lock down

Posted on April 10, 2020 by John Howson

Laura of TeachTapp and and Freddie Whittaker have written an article in SchoolsWeek about teacher vacancies that confirms what TeachVac has been saying on Linkedin. http://www.teachvac.co.uk

Having crunched some numbers, the team at TeachVac have noted a bigger fall in primary teacher jobs than in the secondary sector. However, both sectors, and especially the secondary sector, had a very strong first couple of months of 2020.

Recorded Vacancies for Teachers by TeachVac
	All
	2018	2019	2020
January	5492	6386	8216
February	5056	5791	8421
March	7159	9029	9302
subtotal	17707	21206	25939
April	1799	4233	1793
Total	19506	25439	27732

	Primary
	2018	2019	2020
January	1910	1568	1719
February	2046	1617	2103
March	2944	2844	2491
subtotal	6900	6029	6313
April	819	1423	419
Total	7719	7452	6732

	Secondary
	2018	2019	2020
January	3582	4818	6497
February	3010	4174	6318
March	4215	6185	6811
subtotal	10807	15177	19626
April	980	2810	1374
Total	11787	17987	21000

Contact me if you want details of secondary subjects.

1000 and out?

Posted on January 24, 2020 by John Howson

Seven years ago, in January 2013, I started writing this blog. Over the years the number of posts have fluctuated, as the table below reveals.

Year	Total Posts	Total Words	Average Words per Post
2013	108	72,284	669
2014	121	76,579	633
2015	113	66,337	587
2016	146	83,869	574
2017	164	92,350	563
2018	183	107,223	586
2019	161	88,792	552
2020	4	2,073	537
total	1,000	589,507	590

Source WordPress data

Seemingly, I have become less wordy over the years, with 2019 posts containing around 120 fewer words on average than the 2013 posts. There have been more than 1,000 likes for these posts, and slightly more comments from readers. I am especially indebted to Janet Downs for her many and helpful comments over the years.

Since early 2018, visitors numbers to the blog have started to reduce, and although Christmas Day 2019 saw someone view the whole archive of posts, making it highest day for views ever recorded, the trend has been for fewer and fewer views.

If this trend continues, is it worth my making the effort to write this blog? I started it in 2013 because I was concerned that there would be a teacher supply crisis, and I wanted a platform after writing regularly for the TES for over 10 years, and for Education Journal for a couple of years after that. It is interesting to look back at the discussions over teacher supply during the summer of 2013 that so upset some within the DfE. I would like to be able to predict when teacher supply will no longer be an issue, but on present trends that may not be until the second half of this decade for the secondary sector. There should be less of a problem in the primary sector.

Since 2013, I have established TeachVac, the largest free vacancy service for teachers, and also been elected as a county councillor in Oxfordshire – and, incidentally, stood in three general elections as a candidate– and found time for a range of other activities as well.

So I am conflicted as to whether or not either to continue this blog in its current form or just to sign off at this the 1,000 post? TeachVac continues to expand, listing more than 60,000 vacancies last year, and is already on track for more in 2020, and is consuming more and more of my time. Happily, it remains the largest free job site open to both schools and teachers in England, so is well worth the effort.

With the DfE’s move to take over the application process for graduate teacher preparation being trialed with some providers this year, even that monthly update provided by this blog may become impossible, unless the DfE allow access to the data on at least the same basis as UCAS have done over the past few years.

So, perhaps it’s time for a rest and a search for new horizons. Thank you all for your comments and questions.

10 Adverts per school in 2019

Posted on December 9, 2019 by John Howson

The average secondary school has placed 10 adverts for teachers during 2019. The figure is higher for most schools in London and the Home Counties and lower for many schools in the north of England.

The data are from TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk the leading job boards for teachers looking for posts anywhere in England.

Of course, the average is a crude measure, as it isn’t related to the size of the school in terms of its pupil population. There are schools with more than 2,000 pupils and also at the opposite end of the scale there are those with only a few hundred pupils.

Once the year is over, TeachVac will link the number of vacancies to the pupil roll of the school, as supplied by the DfE in its data, and compare the outcome with indicators such as the percentage of pupils with Free School Meals. As TeachVac has data for several years, it will be possible to start to identify trends and whether there are certain types of school where staff turnover is more common.

Of course, now that the number of pupils entering secondary schools is on the increase, and there are also new schools being established, the picture is not as clear cut as if it were a steady state in relation to the size of the secondary school population.

The data also reveals how the demand for teachers corresponds to the supply, at least for new entrants. Data on returners seeing work is still patchy, and a national register might be a useful tool for the new government to consider.

After all, what is the point of training teachers if there are also returners willing to work as teachers? As I have said before on this blog, enticing mature entrants into teaching and then not offering them work is a wasteful misuse of human resources. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the Humanities.

There are far more history and geography trainees than required by schools. History trainees, unless lucky to be on Teach First or School Direct Salaried Scheme, have to pay fees and find the cost of looking after themselves during their training, all this expenditure with no guarantee of a job.

This year, 2019-2020, according to DfE figures, some 178 history trainees are being supported by public funds (65 on School Direct Salaried Scheme and 113 on Teach First). By comparison, some 1400+ trainees are using student loans and other funds to train as a teacher.

With such over-recruitment into training, it isn’t clear why the government allowed spending on 178 history trainees at a cost of perhaps £400,000 of public money? That’s unnecessary public expenditure. Add in those 130 geography and PE trainees also on salary schemes, subjects where supply of trainees also exceeds demand for teachers, and the cost to the public purse is well over half a million pounds.

The current hybrid system of training teachers looks overdue for a re-think. Whether it will get one from the next government is probably unlikely while planning for Brexit continues to dominate the agenda.

John Howson

Education and the numbers that affect what happens

Tag Archives: www.teachvac.co.uk