With the recruitment of new trainee teachers continuing to be a national problem, it would be easy for teacher training providers to scale back on marketing.

However, at The Compton School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) we have increased our marketing efforts over the past two years or so and seen our cohort intake more than double from 19 to 42 between 2022 and 2023.

While these numbers won’t solve the problem alone, if every SCITT could boost intakes and appeal to more trainees, the situation would be vastly improved. So what did we do?

1. Use your staff and school partners as recruiters

Word of mouth is crucial for strong recruitment in any sector and teaching is no different. It’s easy, though, to know this but not do anything about it.

You have to actively encourage staff to be vocal in spreading the word about what a career in teaching offers and why your SCITT is a great place to get that career started.

You can help with this by ensuring you proactively share positive news about the SCITT and the development of trainees through channels including school partners’ newsletters, trust publications (such as our Teaching and Learning Journal), websites and social media.

Sharing these stories and asking staff to share them on your behalf can boost your reach at little to no cost.

For example, sharing the career journey of a former SCITT trainee teacher in a trust publication puts the message out that our SCITT trainees are well-qualified and quickly promoted owing to their quality, which can appeal to future cohorts considering their options.

We also share messages about the success of current SCITT trainees through staff bulletins and briefings, focusing on their success and involvement in the school community, and use this to showcase what life is like on our course and the positive impact it has.

We involve former SCITT trainees in interviews to talk about the programme to candidates. There is no better person to speak to new trainee teachers about the ups and downs than a teacher we have trained.

2. Use your networks

In addition to colleagues, leverage any wider networks to promote your training offer.

Make connections with local community organisations and universities so they can support you to spread the word and reach your target audience. For example, our involvement in Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) internship programmes provided a pipeline to undergraduates interested in teaching.

You should also encourage colleagues to regularly attend local events or facilitate joint projects between your SCITT and schools, trusts or other organisations in your area. You could invite a school partner to a Department for Education Train to Teach event to talk about their own school and the benefits of training there, as well as the upsides of training with the SCITT.

Your networks can also support you in tailoring your trainee offering to ensure you are meeting the needs of local areas. For example, some of our partner schools had specific subject shortages, so we listened to their challenges to develop a wider offer which would target those needs, thereby increasing the potential trainees we could reach.

3. Use your neighbouring SCITTs

Avoid falling into the trap of seeing neighbouring SCITTs as competition. The recruitment and retention crisis is something we all have to tackle together.

So for trainees looking to take a specific course that we don’t offer, or who may live closer to a different SCITT, we put them in touch with the SCITT we think might best support their individual needs. Those SCITTs do the same for us in return. This is mainly done through verbal communication and offering advice to trainee teachers on the course that would benefit them the most.

By matching the right trainee to the right programme, we can ensure they are in the best possible environment to hit the ground running in their careers, increasing their opportunities for success and retaining them in the system.

Using and, to a certain extent, exhausting every channel available to help reach more people - and to encourage them to take the leap into a profession that will give them the chance to make a lasting impact on generations of young people - is what our sector needs.

Stuart Merritt is SCITT director at The Compton School Centred Initial Teacher Training and deputy headteacher at The Compton School, part of the Middlesex Learning Trust