One fifth of teachers who undertake the early career framework (ECF) leave after two years, government data published today reveals.
Some 79.3 per cent of early career teachers (ECTs) were still teaching in state schools in 2023, two years after beginning the ECF, according to data published by the Department for Education today.
Here are three things that we learned from the data:
1. One fifth of early career teachers leave
Of the 21,008 ECTs who started the ECF induction in 2021, 79.3 per cent were retained after two years according to the school workforce census.
This is equivalent to 4,352 ECTs who were no longer teaching in state schools in 2023 after two years. Those who left the state school sector might have joined the private school sector or left the profession altogether.
The retention rate is similar to the last - pre-pandemic - figures published in the school workforce census, when 78.3 per cent of teachers were still in the profession in 2019, two years after qualifying.
Impact of ECF ‘not clear cut’
However, Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research, said that the impact of the ECF on early career teacher retention “is still very much unclear and uncertain”.
He said that it was not “clear cut” that there had been an improvement in retention under the ECF owing to several other changes in the past six years, including an increase to teacher pay and the starting salary in particular.
The ECF, launched in 2021 as a cornerstone of the previous government’s 2019 recruitment and retention “golden thread” reforms, aims for ECTs to be mentored on a one-to-one basis to “improve support for early career teachers and ultimately boost retention”.
Yet since its inception, the government has been beset by concerns about the workload the framework creates for both mentors and newly qualified teachers, as well as repetition.
Earlier this year, the DfE announced that new and initial teacher training curricula would be rolled into one framework from September 2025.
2. DfE misses NPQ target by 28 per cent
Meanwhile, recruitment of teachers and leaders to government-funded National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) has fallen far short of the three-year target, according to data published today.
The DfE launched the reformed NPQ courses in the autumn of 2021 with the aim of delivering 150,000 NPQ participant places over three years from autumn 2021 until the end of the 2023-24 academic year.
However, after three years, the department has recorded just 107,873 funded NPQ course starts in the academic years 2021-22 and 2023-24 (72 per cent).
By 2023-24, under a fifth (17 per cent) of the state school workforce had started a reformed NPQ since 2021.
3. Mentor numbers dip again
Today’s data also reveals that 18,152 mentors were trained for provider-led ECF induction in 2023-24.
This is a 6 per cent decrease from the 19,368 trained in 2022-23, and far lower than the 26,713 mentors trained in the previous year.
It is not known how many mentors who have been trained over the two years are still actively involved in the ECF.
There have been 75,882 ECTs enrolled in provider-led ECF since 2021.
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