School leaders are warning that this term’s teacher transfer window deadline has been the “worst” and is causing “major anxiety”, as the recruitment crisis bites.
And leaders say there is “no way out” as they go into the next recruitment cycle already facing unfilled vacancies, after the loss of teaching staff throughout the academic year.
Earlier this year Tes revealed that secondary school job vacancies had soared to their highest levels for at least six years and showed “no sign of slowing”.
The number of jobs advertised between last September and the end of February was 25 per cent higher than in the same period in the pre-pandemic part of the 2019-20 academic year, according to SchoolDash data analysed by Tes.
And last year the government failed to meet its initial teacher training recruitment targets, achieving just 59 per cent of the target for secondary teacher trainee entrants starting courses, heightening concerns around teacher supply.
Teacher recruitment difficulties
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that although the transfer deadline has always been a worrying time for school leaders, “it’s now a major anxiety because of the risk of losing members of staff and finding it impossible to replace them during a worsening recruitment crisis”.
Teacher transfer windows occur three times a year - at the end of February, May and October - with deadlines setting out when teachers should inform their current school that they intend to leave at the end of term.
Asked if this was the worst transfer deadline in a long time, Sufian Sadiq, director of the teaching school at Chiltern Learning Trust, agreed, adding: “The shortage of supply into the system is a lot more evident at the moment and what we know is that, increasingly, there’s a panic.”
Commenting on the ITT application figures for this year to date, Mr Sadiq said there was a heightened panic for those who understood the numbers that are coming into the system for next year.
Earlier this year government figures revealed that applications to primary ITT courses had fallen by almost a fifth year-on-year, while applications to secondary courses had fallen year-on-year for the first time.
Mr Sadiq said that these numbers, compounded by years of underrecruitment, meant that supply has been very low amid “really high” demand.
He added that schools are now “paying above the odds” to ensure that they are not left unstaffed.
And he warned that, as a result, the divide between rich, higher-performing schools and poorer, lower-performing schools will grow.
Fears over Ofsted judgements
School leaders have also voiced concern about the effects of the recruitment crisis on Ofsted judgements.
One headteacher told Tes that in a recent Ofsted inspection at their school its quality-of-education judgement was “severely affected” by the difficulties it was facing with recruitment.
The leader, who wished to remain anonymous, had not been able to offer a subject to a certain year group for the past two years, despite advertising for the teaching role seven times over that period.
During the inspection, the leader was told that this shortfall was “a limitation and a narrowing of the curriculum”, and while they made their efforts to recruit clear, they felt Ofsted “completely ignored it”.
An Ofsted spokesperson said it has “repeatedly called attention to the impact of the recruitment crisis in schools, including in our recent annual report, and continue to engage with government on this issue”.
They added that Ofsted does “take context into account” but “inspectors must inspect a school as they find it and report on the quality of education being provided”.
When making the quality-of-education judgement, inspectors understand that developing and embedding an effective curriculum does take time, the watchdog said. If leaders have an accurate understanding of current curriculum practice and have identified the appropriate next steps to improve, inspectors will “evaluate ‘intent’ favourably”.
‘The crisis requires intervention’
Vic Goddard, co-principal of Passmores Academy in Harlow, Essex, said: “The problem we have got this year, more than ever, is we have got this deadline but we go into this window with vacancies already, and that is part of the problem.”
Mr Goddard said that the school used to have capacity within its staffing and now it has “zero”.
He said he was also entering the period with a vacancy for a head of maths that had been unfilled for around five months, alongside a number of other vacancies that he knows he will not get any applicants for.
Asked if the situation requires further government action, Mr Sadiq said “any crisis requires intervention”,
He added that it requires a “clear strategy and an action plan” for a way out of the crisis, and warned that at the moment the sector was struggling “on all of those fronts”.
Glyn Potts, headteacher at Newman Roman Catholic College in Oldham, said that this teacher transfer window deadline has felt “more panicked and frenetic than it ever has in the past”.
Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union, has said that while the departure rates for this teacher transfer deadline “will not be known for some time”, they had the “potential to be profoundly affected by the education secretary’s continued reluctance to work with unions to find resolutions on pay, funding and workload”.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We want to attract the best teachers into our classrooms to ensure that there is an excellent teacher for every child.
“As part of this work we are actively looking to boost the numbers qualified teachers in our schools, especially in key subjects such as physics and languages, where recruitment challenges can be most acute.
“This includes a range of financial incentives for domestic teachers, including bursaries and scholarships, worth up to £27,000 and £29,000 tax-free, to encourage talented trainees to key subjects such as maths, physics, chemistry and computing.”
