The schools minister has today admitted that the government has “clearly got a lot of work to do” on teacher recruitment and retention, amid warnings about “dire” supply.
Damian Hinds faced the Commons Education Select Committee nearly a week after figures revealed that the government had recruited half as many secondary teachers as it said were needed - even worse than last year.
Mr Hinds, who oversaw the publication of the 2019 recruitment and retention strategy when he was education secretary, told MPs today that the department was operating in a “particularly competitive graduate labour market” and he did not “underestimate the scale of what we need to do”.
Questioned by the committee chair, Robin Walker, Mr Hinds was asked if he agreed with comments that the teacher recruitment and retention situation “remains at crisis level”.
“We’ve clearly got a lot of work to do, chairman,” Mr Hinds said.
“But it’s still true that it is a very, very competitive labour market overall” and “it’s a particularly competitive graduate labour market”, he added.
“I absolutely don’t underestimate the scale of what we need to do.”
New recruitment and retention strategy is ‘progressing’
On the expected update to the recruitment and retention strategy, which was first revealed by Tes, Mr Hinds said the department is “progressing at pace” but it is “really important we get it right”.
He could not provide the committee with any specific timings on when the update would be published.
Mr Hinds was also questioned about the take-up of the postgraduate teaching apprenticeship, which he said was “small but growing”.
He did admit that there was a need for the government to “spread awareness of it”.
Aim to bring down workload
On the question of workload, Mr Hinds told the committee that workload is “too high” but there has been “some success”. He said that a lot of the extra workload was coming from the “out-of-classroom stuff“.
The Department for Education (DfE) has set up a workload reduction taskforce with the aim of bringing down teacher working hours by five hours a week.
Mr Hinds added that, if the DfE was going to achieve this plan, it needed to address “planning and prep, and marking and data”.
MPs also questioned Mr Hinds about the effectiveness of the workload reduction toolkit. A poll by Teacher Tapp earlier this year suggested that fewer than one in 10 senior leaders had found the DfE’s toolkit useful.
Mr Hinds said he knew that the workload reduction toolkit was “not perfect” and said it was “going to be refined into a digital slicker version”.
‘Cultural resistance’ to flexible working
Mr Hinds also told MPs that flexible working “is a really important part of attracting and keeping people in any occupation” but that “sometimes you get a bit of cultural resistance in the teacher world”.
Mr Hinds claimed that the fact that teaching is a timetabled occupation makes it “more suited” to flexible working and insisted that to attract the “full range of talent, we need to be offering flexible working”.
‘More to do’ on ECF
Mr Hinds said that the Early Career Framework (ECF) had “developed well” but that there was more to be done to “refine it”.
The ECF, launched in 2021, aims for early career teachers (ECTs) to be mentored on a one-to-one basis to “improve support for early career teachers” and, therefore, retention.
However, concerns have been raised about the workload that the ECF creates for ECTs and their mentors.
The DfE is currently overseeing a review of the ECF and Mr Hinds said today that the department would “listen to the feedback”.
Sue Lovelock, the DfE’s director of teaching workforce - covering candidates, trainees, strategy, portfolio and analysis - was giving evidence to the committee alongside Mr Hinds. She said the department was looking at “stripping out” the repetition between teacher training and ECF.
Mr Hinds said that the government would look to bring in any changes to the ECF from 2025.
