The Labour government plans to recruit 6,500 new teachers would require pay rises of nearly 10 per cent a year for two consecutive years, if a change in salary was the only incentive, according to a new analysis.
The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) suggests this would cost an additional £2.1 billion next year (2025-26), rising to £4.9 billion in 2026-27 and onwards.
By 2027/28, such a pay increase would restore the relative position of teachers’ pay within the country’s earnings distribution that it had in 2010.
Non-financial levers ‘not enough to meet target’
The NFER is urging ministers to publish the strategy for how it defines and plans to meet the recruitment target, and how it will be funded.
Its report highlights the potential for lower-cost options that either rely on cost-effective spending on targeted measures aimed at shortage subjects, particularly bursaries and early-career retention payments (ECRPs), or on non-financial measures such as reducing workload or improving continuing professional development (CPD).
But it says non-financial levers such as reducing teachers’ working hours by five hours per week, and reintroducing funded national CPD programmes would not, in isolation, be enough to ensure the government achieves its target.
Targeted measures aimed at shortage subjects, such as physics, could include an expanded set of retention payments made available to a wider set of teachers.
Increasing pay ‘could deliver required number of teachers’
The report, How to recruit 6,500 teachers? Modelling the potential routes to deliver Labour’s teacher supply pledge, provides a detailed analysis of some of the potential policy choices available to the government, with estimated costs.
The analysis, funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, estimates that the pay increase needed would cost the government £4.9 billion pounds per year from 2026-27 and beyond to finance.
Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the NFER and co-author of the report, says the analysis shows that substantially increasing teachers’ pay could possibly deliver the required number of teachers, “but it comes at a very high cost that is unlikely to be feasible in the current fiscal environment. Achieving the supply target will require new policy measures,” he concludes.
The research adds that many current policy measures would not be sufficient to meet the supply target in isolation.
Bursary increases alone would not be able to attract enough trainees to hit the 6,500 target unless levels were raised above starting salaries. ECRPs and broader retention payments could be used, but NFER warns increasing the value of targeted bursaries and ECRPs could create large disparities in pay between subjects.
Report reflects ‘scale of the recruitment challenge’
The report finds that quantifiable evidence on the impact of existing recruitment initiatives is “weak and limited”, and recommends that the government invests in deepening the evidence base of interventions that can improve teacher recruitment and retention.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said the report reflects the scale of the recruitment challenge the government faces. He warned that recruiting 6,500 more teachers would be unlikely to be enough to address the level of shortages in the sector.
“Improved pay and conditions across the profession are the absolute prerequisites for any strategy. It is vital to ensure that salaries are competitive enough to attract recruits and then retain them.
“The new government has taken a step in the right direction with this year’s schoolteachers’ pay award, but this will need to be followed up by further improvements in future years,” he said.
*An earlier version of this article stated that the target required three years of consecutive rises of 10 per cent. The NFER later updated its analysis and the article now reflects these revised figures.
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