Ministers have delayed publication of the Department for Education’s updated recruitment and retention strategy amid “uncertainty” over future planning and the prime minister’s plans for the Advanced British Standard (ABS) qualification, Tes has learned.
The decision to delay publication of the updated strategy until next spring was taken by ministers this week after they were given a first draft by officials for review, Tes can reveal.
An internal DfE memo seen by Tes said that more work will now need to be undertaken as the delay will “open up new opportunities (and risks) for potential content”; including on pay, the ABS and the potential findings of the Commons Education Select Committee inquiry into recruitment and retention.
Tes revealed in September that the DfE was set to refresh its 2019 recruitment and retention strategy, with a timeline later set for publication this winter.
But now “uncertainty around 2024-25 business planning outcomes, alongside existing interactions over pay, the ABS announcement and the Workload Reduction Taskforce” had made a December publication of the plans “untenable”, the DfE memo said.
Officials’ efforts to find funding to pay for the teacher pay rise next year is one of the key issues causing the uncertainty, Tes understands.
The DfE allocated £40 million in extra funding to schools to support them in paying the 6.5 per cent pay rise for teachers this year after the deal was agreed in the summer. However, it said the funding was a one-off for this year as the agreement with unions came after school budgets were set.
The DfE said that it would provide funding for 3 per cent of the pay rise from next year, but said it would not fund this from “frontline” budgets, including special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and school capital funding, according to union leaders.
School and workforce leaders and experts have repeatedly raised the alarm over the “vicious cycle” of low recruitment and the fact that teachers are now leaving the profession at the highest rate in four years.
The government failed to meet its initial teacher training (ITT) recruitment targets last year, with just 59 per cent of the target number of secondary teacher trainees starting courses.
Recruitment and retention strategy decision
The existing schools’ recruitment and retention strategy was first published before the pandemic in 2019 under former education secretary Damian Hinds, and set out plans to provide more support for early career teachers and to make it easier to apply to become a teacher.
The announcement of the update to the workforce strategy came in September, after urgent calls from experts for a review amid a deepening teacher shortage.
The DfE’s Teaching Workforce Strategy Unit “will now do some further planning in the coming “days/weeks about what this delay means in practice”, according to this week’s DfE memo.
It added that postponing publication will “open up new opportunities (and risks) for potential content”; including on pay, the ABS and the findings of the select committee inquiry into teacher recruitment and retention.
Officials will now aim to “put up some follow-up advice to ministers” by the end of the month on confirming a new launch date for the strategy and content revisions, the memo said.
