A plan that the government hopes will create hundreds more teacher trainees has been dismissed as “bizarre” and “optimistic” by training providers.
In an email seen by Tes, the Department for Education has told initial teacher education (ITE) providers that teacher training applicants will now be able to apply for up to four courses, instead of three.
In the email, the DfE hailed the “positive impact” it had seen “from allowing candidates to apply for more courses if their applications were not successful the first time”.
The latest move is part of an attempt to help “eligible candidates receive more teacher training offers”, the email said.
The DfE said that its data “shows that the more course choices an eligible candidate makes, the more likely they are to receive an offer to train to be a teacher”.
The department claimed that a 1 per cent increase in the number of candidates who get an offer could lead to over 300 additional teacher trainees.
However, many in the sector doubt that the change will make a difference.
James Noble-Rogers, executive director at the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET), said: “It is rather optimistic of DfE to assume that the change will result in a net increase in recruitment, as it is unlikely that anyone who has been rejected by three providers will be successful if they have a fourth option.”
Will the ITT applications change boost recruitment?
UCET is also “concerned” about the “increased workload this will involve for already hard-pressed ITE providers”, he said.
The new policy comes after the latest teacher trainee recruitment data was described as “catastrophic” by headteachers’ leaders last year, when the DfE missed its target for secondary teacher trainee entrants by 41 per cent.
Lisa Murtagh, deputy head of the Manchester Institute of Education, said that she could not see how the DfE’s latest plan “will solve a recruitment crisis” and she expected it to have “negative implications for staff workloads”.
“It also seems bizarre that the DfE have instigated a change to the application process midway through a cycle,” she said.
Meanwhile, one school-centred initial teacher training director labelled the move as a “knee-jerk, short-term sticking plaster for what is a deeper wound in the sector”.
Emma Hollis, executive director of the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers (NASBTT), was slightly more hopeful. She said that “given the dire state of recruitment that we are currently facing, there’s merit in trying anything that makes a difference, even if marginal”.
But she added that she did not think that the change would “move the needle far enough to address the shortages”.
Susan O’Brien, a member of Sheffield Institute of Education’s leadership team, at Sheffield Hallam University, also said that the measure would not signficantly increase the number of applicants to teaching.
She said that, while it was “very welcome that the DfE are looking at ways to support providers with recruitment”, she was “not convinced” that it would have the desired impact.
And she said that the move would “increase the resource required by providers to carry out the rigorous selection processes”.
A spokesperson for the department of teacher training at the University of East London said they were “not sure that having an additional application choice will, in fact, benefit applicants, but it will add an additional layer of uncertainty in the system with applicants waiting for four interviews/offers before choosing”.
They added that it could also increase the number of applicants and would therefore “increase administration around admissions”.
The DfE has been contacted for comment.
