Recruitment shortfalls and high attrition rates have almost become the new normal in teaching, as the National Foundation for Educational Research showed in its recent Teacher Labour Market report.
Since the Carter review of initial teacher education in 2015, the government has met its own annual recruitment targets just once. The NFER suggests this will persist, predicting that overall secondary teacher recruitment will reach 61 per cent of the target level in 2024-25.
More troubling still, the number who are considering leaving teaching increased 44 per cent between 2021-22 and 2022-23. The Department for Education’s own data shows record numbers of teachers resigning from their jobs.
There has been no shortage of proposals to address this crisis. Recently Sir Andrew Carter, who authored the 2015 review, advocated a renewed effort to improve the image of the profession.
The NFER has recommended bursaries, which appear to influence recruitment for shortage subjects. Meanwhile, the government implements various scattergun interventions, including an apprenticeships scheme, which unions consider half-baked and “unworkable”, and a six-figure deal to develop teenagers’ teaching skills through the Scout Association.
Fixing the teacher recruitment crisis
These ideas amount to sticking plasters for an ailment requiring major surgery. As the NFER shows, the issues are fundamental. Too few people want to become teachers, too many teachers leave prematurely, and the expectations and workload concerns of new teachers are changing. Short-term, one-off policy fixes are doomed to fail. The system needs far-reaching reform.
Ironically, teachers themselves are frequently overlooked in this discussion.
Yet when asked last month at a debate at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education’s Cambridge Festival event - which brought together practitioners, headteachers, teacher-educators and others - to answer the question, “Who can fix the teacher recruitment and retention crisis?”, their insights pointed towards systemic change.
They spoke about a transformed relationship with communities, necessitated by deteriorating social care and mental health services and economic pressures.
They also criticised the increasing scale of some multi-academy trusts, which appear disconnected from classroom reality. The audience heard how the standardised, performative teacher behaviours enforced by some MATs are openly mocked by students.
A ‘whole-system’ approach
Schools are also navigating a multitude of other complex issues: neurodiversity, disability, behaviour, parental support, and the rising cost of living.
There is an urgent need for a “whole-system” approach, where education policy joins up with health and social care.
Teachers are a crucial point of contact for young people and families, but as Evelyn Forde, of the Association of School and College Leaders, recently put it, schools have become a “fourth emergency service”. They need a structure in which they can access other professionals when needed.
And all this places additional demands on teachers, while the systems designed to support them are woefully inadequate.
In recent years government has increased its control over what teachers are meant to know and do (through the initial teacher training and early career framework); the research that teachers rely on (narrowly curated by the Education Endowment Foundation); and how teachers develop (through the so-called “golden thread” of Department for Education-controlled professional development).
Collectively, these policy measures conceptualise teaching as a set of trainable skills acquired through repetition, and assume an idealised, imaginary classroom.
Perhaps repetition works if you are learning to flip burgers, brew coffee or work on an assembly line; less so if you need to foster relationships with 30 complex individual students.
Instead teaching requires what the sociologist Basil Bernstein called a “repertoire” of approaches and a “reservoir” of understanding.
The repertoire matters because teachers need routines to get children learning, to start and end lessons, transition between activities and communicate rules.
But they also need a deeper understanding of teaching, learning, relationships and the factors that affect them. This is the reservoir. Teachers draw on it when the unpredictable happens.
Failure ‘baked into’ the system
The government preference for repertoire gives teachers such a limited reservoir that they find themselves under-prepared and disempowered when faced with the realities of classrooms, schools and communities.
This is why the NEU teaching union’s Emma Rose recently identified limited professional autonomy as one reason why failure is “baked into” the education system.
Yet the government has doubled down on frameworks that clearly don’t work.
As the education policy expert Maria Teresa Tatto notes, for a policy to be valid, it must be seen as valuable by those whom it affects. In other words, the professional knowledge base needs to be owned and verified by the profession, not government.
As such, instead of implementing policy that tinkers ineffectually at the edges of the teacher crisis, the next government needs to change tack and start listening to teachers more.
If it did it would hear, as we did, highly skilled professionals who are dissatisfied, burned out, fed up with inadequate policy and exhausted from filling the gaps left by cuts to other services.
Instead, future policy must focus on systemic reform grounded in a sector-led conversation about what we want from schools, teachers and education. The profession is asking to determine its own future.
Clare Brooks is professor of education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge
Tom Kirk is co-organiser of the Cambridge Festival event at the Faculty of Education
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