Teacher recruitment is now the most challenging part of a school leader’s day job.

There are simply not enough teachers being trained and not enough staying in teaching beyond the first three years following qualification.

The Department for Education has only hit its teacher recruitment target once in the past 11 years and only three of the 18 subject areas are supplied with sufficient teachers.

So, what do those intending to be the newly elected government plan to do about this on 5 July? (You can read the manifesto pledges here.)

If elected, Labour pledges to recruit “6,500 new expert teachers in key subjects” but there is also a deeper understanding shown in their manifesto that retention of staff is better than recruitment.

A rough road

We at the Headteachers’ Roundtable agree - but would argue this can only happen if teachers truly feel that society values their professional status once more.

Our profession has been undermined for over a decade. Our lived experiences and academic expertise have been dismissed.

The language used by successive education secretaries has served to undermine society’s respect and confidence in the vocation we were drawn to. Michael Gove scolded us for being “enemies of promise” and characterised us as “the blob”.

Then during the pandemic, we became key “workers” not professionals, there to provide childminding for the furloughed and valued business class, but not precious enough to be near the front of the queue when vaccines became available.

This diminishment has taken its toll on our workforce. Working in and leading our schools has, imperceptibly, become an unattractive prospect.

Pay and conditions have been insufficiently competitive and flexible to attract prospective candidates and to retain existing staff.

Voting with their feet

In comparison, competing graduate employment offers working from home as a bonus not available to those on the professional frontline. And as yet, no pay premium is offered to the professional frontline.

An exponential increase in demands on schools, in particular the loss of other services around the child, has created untenable working conditions and caused institutional burnout.

A lack of trust and respect in our profession has manifested itself in unhealthy and inhumane accountability pressures, in particular the punitive nature of single-word Ofsted judgements.

Graduates are voting with their feet and pursuing other pathways, hence the job of finding sufficient teachers to run the school curriculum has become a school leader’s number one obsession. It feels impossible.

What we need is a long-term strategy to mend the damaged and demoralised education workforce. Some of what is required demands more funding for schools. It is not enough to protect the funding levels that already exist.

Teachers and support staff must be adequately rewarded for the expertise and hard work involved in their jobs and given sufficient non-contact time, staff training and support.

Time to talk teaching up

But a cheaper and equally potent alternative lies in encouraging a change in our society’s attitudes toward teachers and teaching. Teaching needs talking up.

We can make our teachers feel valued by re-establishing the notion that teaching is a research-informed academic profession, just as the Chartered College of Teaching aims to do.

We can do it by dispensing with the ritual humiliation of Ofsted grades that dissuade talented people from risking school leadership.

We know that listening to our views will contribute to that sense of value but the biggest thing any new government can do to reverse the negative narrative is to put education at the heart of political policy once more. Our society simply does not prioritise education in 2024.

Hope ahead but plenty to do

Labour, if elected, could change this if it treats us as worthy and intelligent; capable of co-constructing responses to the challenges we face. There is some hope.

When shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson sings the praises of her Spanish teacher, Zahida Haq, she makes us believe this sense of feeling properly valued as an educator is possible again.

We need more of this because, while a promise of 6,500 new teachers is a small step in the right direction, more than small steps are going to be needed.

Caroline Derbyshire is chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable and executive headteacher and chief executive of Saffron Academy Trust

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