The government is poised to launch a refresh of its teacher recruitment and retention strategy amid signs that the “catastrophic” teacher supply crisis is deepening, Tes can reveal.
Department for Education officials have drawn up plans to review its workforce approach for a post-Covid world with a focus on flexible working, Tes understands.
This follows urgent calls from experts for the government to review its strategy, published in 2019, to take into account drastically worsening levels of teacher recruitment and retention.
The refresh could be announced as early as next week, alongside the launch of a new expert group, Tes understands.
The recruitment and retention strategy was 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.
However, there have been calls to rework the strategy after 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.
DfE reviews teacher recruitment
There had previously been an “unprecedented increase” in teacher trainee applications during the pandemic in 2020-21, as rising numbers of people faced job insecurity. But the numbers have fallen sharply since then, and there are now more teacher vacancies than before Covid.
Analysis published earlier this week revealed that the government is set to have recruited just 52 per cent of the secondary postgraduate trainees needed to hit its target for 2023-24 courses.
It also emerged this week that the rate at which state school teachers are leaving the profession hit its highest level in four years last year, with one in 10 of all qualified teachers leaving the state-funded sector.
Professor Sam Twiselton, emeritus professor at Sheffield Hallam University and part of the expert advisory group for the original recruitment and retention strategy, said that any refresh would be welcomed because “the world has changed quite a lot” since the original plan.
She added that a lot had been learned from Covid, which meant that “flexible working has an even higher premium” than before.
Could teacher training be funded?
The refreshed strategy must focus on a longer-term “vision” for increasing the competitiveness of the teaching profession via pay and other financial incentives, and tackle public perceptions about the work of a teacher, education workforce experts have told Tes.
Professor Twiselton said the government should look again at whether teacher training could be funded, and do more work to improve the public perception of teaching.
However, she pointed to “a challenge with the timescale” of implementing a new strategy, with a general election due next year.
“To do the kind of work that would really make a difference probably takes longer than that,” she said.
Flexible working ‘not impossible’
Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), said the strategy would need to ensure that the growth of flexible working outside of teaching is “compensated for to maintain competitiveness”.
He added that plan needs to include a long-term “clear vision for teacher pay and financial incentives”.
Another senior sector leader, who wished to remain anonymous, agreed that flexible working in teaching has not ”taken off as fast as it needs to”, stating: “I think there are big obstacles to making it work in education, but it’s not impossible.”
They added: “There are other sectors that expect people to be present 100 per cent of the time…but they now have to pay a lot more to get that.”
A chance to cut working hours
Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said the review was an opportunity to “reduce working hours and work intensity, transform the way the profession is seen and valued, and initiate a step change in removing barriers to implementing flexible working in schools”.
He added: “It will be crucial, too, to reduce accountability pressures and the wellbeing impacts of inspection, and to publicise a plan to restore pay levels.”
Ian Hartwright, head of policy for the NAHT school leaders’ union, said pay must be at the “heart” of any new strategy.
”[The DfE] need to build on this year’s pay settlement to restore pay to 2010 levels in real terms and protect salaries against current inflation,” he said.
Meanwhile, James Noble-Rogers, executive director of the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers, called for a reversal of a decision, made as part of the government’s controversial ITT review, to withdraw accreditation “from so many well-established and high-quality existing providers”.
