A former Department for Education senior policy adviser has said that he does not expect that an incoming Labour government will be able to “fix” teacher recruitment and has predicted that teaching will become a “visa profession”, similar to healthcare.
Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour Party conference, former DfE adviser Sam Freedman warned that teacher recruitment is “fundamentally broken”.
Mr Freedman said he thought the recruitment crisis would be the “biggest burning platform” for Labour if it were to win the next general election, and warned that if things continue on the current trajectory the situation is going to “get worse”.
It comes as the sector faces a deepening recruitment and retention crisis, with schools facing large numbers of vacancies.
However, when asked by Tes about Mr Freedman’s comments at a later conference event, the shadow schools minister Catherine McKinnell said that she did not feel pessimistic about Labour’s potential to “really turn around some of these issues”.
And she said she did not share the feeling that “things cannot change”, insisting she felt “optimistic”.
Teacher recruitment ‘fundamentally broken’
Speaking at a Labour fringe event, Mr Freedman also warned that “we are going to become reliant on poor quality teachers” if the recruitment crisis continued.
“I don’t think Labour will fix recruitment, I think it is really quite fundamentally broken and I think you’d have to put up pay far more than the Treasury will let them put it up to get back to where we were in terms of an equilibrium on recruitment,” Mr Freedman said.
However, Mr Freedman added: “I really hope I’m wrong about that; I’d love to be wrong about that.”
The former senior policy adviser also predicted a future for teaching similar to healthcare, which he said had become “a visa profession”. “You can see it happening already,” Mr Freedman said.
Later, Ms McKinnell said: “I don’t feel pessimistic about our potential to really turn around some of these issues that we’re facing.”
She said that she felt “optimistic” that resetting the relationship between the government and the profession - and tackling the problems with wider services - would have an impact on recruitment and “start to rebuild that sense of value that teachers need to feel”.
However, she said that she was “not oblivious” to the scale of the challenge faced by the country.
