A decline in education standards could occur as schools struggle to cover classes with specialist teachers amid recruitment and retention challenges, MPs have been told.
And the Commons Education Select Committee was also warned that it is not impossible that the schools sector will have to recruit “the entire stock of teachers again” over the next decade.
These warnings were issued as the committee held the first session of its inquiry into the recruitment and retention of teachers in England today.
It comes after the Department for Education missed its target for secondary teacher trainee entrants by 41 per cent last year, and recent data revealed that the number of state school teachers leaving the profession hit the highest rate in four years last year.
During the inquiry session, a panel of witnesses from school staff unions and other organisations faced questions on what could be done to tackle the current teacher recruitment and retention problems.
Here are the six key points raised:
1. Teacher recruitment struggles will hurt standards
Dame Alison Peacock, chief executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, told MPs: “We’re getting to the point where if you can’t even find a supply teacher, if there isn’t even someone that you can phone up that can come in, it gets to desperate stakes.
“Then you start to think, ‘Well, can we have a cover supervisor that can carry that class over?’ and that then leads to a decline in standards. So we’ve got a very real problem.”
She added: “I’m speaking to colleagues who are headteachers, who are senior leaders, who are saying, ‘We’ve never known it this bad. We don’t know how we’re going to fill our posts.’”
2. Sector may have to recruit ‘entire stock of teachers again’ over next 10 years
Dr Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, told the committee today that the government “has to acknowledge the scale of the challenge”.
Referring to recently published retention data, which showed that a record 40,000 teachers left the state-funded sector in the academic year 2021-22, Dr Roach said: “The government’s own data...suggests it’s not yet beyond the bounds of credibility to suggest that within the next 10 years, we’ll have to recruit the entire stock of teachers again, given the numbers that are leaving the profession currently.”
He added that society “can’t afford the level of wastage in the system” and “the public purse cannot sustain that”.
Commenting on the government’s recruitment and retention strategy, which was published in 2019, Dr Roach said it has not solved the problem.
He said that the situation had instead worsened and it had “not been helped by the fact that since then we have had six secretaries of state [for education]”.
The NASUWT, along with the three other main education unions, is currently in dispute with the Department for Education and is balloting members for strike action and action short of strike action over teachers’ pay, workload and working time.
3. The current pay system ‘is beyond its sell by date’
The committee also questioned Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, on the union’s recommended revisions to pay structure and frameworks for schools.
Mr Whiteman said: “The pay system and the pay structure that we have right now is beyond its sell by date.”
The union leader added that the system had been “tinkered with” over the past 10 years to “try and bring some relief to specific pressures”.
“What happens over a period of time,] is that it means the whole thing becomes more difficult and more unworkable,” he said.
And Mr Whiteman added that the system needed to be adjusted to ensure that good teachers are kept in the classroom, rather than being “forced” into leadership roles to “answer some of their salary difficulties”.
4. The sector lacks confidence on flexible working
On flexible working, Mr Whiteman said that he thought the sector lacked “the cultural confidence to begin to try new things around flexibility within education”, and that teachers with a different working pattern might face judgement about their commitment.
Dame Alison added that there is a “group of women who are finding it very hard to embrace the extreme...rigidity that exists [in teaching] within term time”.
Earlier this month Tes exclusively revealed that nearly half of teachers and school leaders believe that headship is not compatible with parenthood, and more than a quarter of teachers (28 per cent) said they had considered going for a promotion but decided not to due to worries about balancing workload and family life.
Last year’s government Schools White Paper pledged to champion a culture of flexible working.
And a contract published in June last year revealed that the DfE plans to pay up to £768,000 for the delivery of a “culture change programme” focused on embedding flexible working in schools and multi-academy trusts.
Despite the move, in a recent survey one in 10 respondents said they work at a school that does not allow flexible working requests.
5. Rise in cover teachers ‘hides the problem’ of supply
Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said that the “massive rise in cover teachers hides the problem [of capacity]” alongside the number of children “now being taught by teachers teaching outside their subject areas”.
Research from the National Foundation for Educational Research last year revealed that almost half of secondary schools were using non-specialist teachers for maths lessons.
And experts have warned that teacher shortages and the resulting use of non-specialist teachers in certain subjects “may be acting as a drag on system-wide improvement of pupil outcomes”.
6. Teachers’ workload compounded by societal problems
The committee also heard today that teachers’ workload is being compounded by the “poverty level” and a rise in class sizes.
“Those children bring into the classroom massive social and personal problems, and there’s no one else there to deal with them,” Dr Bousted said.
Earlier this year Evelyn Forde, president of the Association of School and College Leaders, said schools have had to become the “fourth emergency service”, with the erosion of support services leaving the sector “to pick up the pieces”.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Next year school funding will be at its highest level in history - in real terms - as a result of the additional £2 billion investment we are making in schools both this year and next.
“The latest data shows that the UK invested more than any other G7 nation in schools and colleges as a share of GDP between 2010-11 and 2019-20. We have also boosted teacher numbers by 27,000 since 2010, meaning that we now have the highest number of full-time teachers on record.”
