It is commonly assumed that paying teachers more, reducing their workload and improving their working conditions would encourage more graduates to train as teachers, and so address the teacher shortage. But this is because research has been asking the wrong people the wrong question. 

Policymakers have a distorted view of what encourages people to become teachers, because there’s a distorted body of research relating to this. Almost none of the research looking at teacher supply issues actually talks to people who are not already on the path to becoming teachers. When, surely, it’s people who could be teachers but don’t want to be who can best tell us why people do not want to be teachers.

It’s similar to widening participation in higher education. Research nearly always asks students at or applying to university about the barriers they faced. But more rarely have there been studies that include a full complement of young people, including people who haven’t been able to go into HE. 

With those students, it’s often not the finance that’s put them off going to HE - they haven’t even got close to the stage of almost going, and therefore having to worry about finance. The reason why most students don’t go to university is because they’re not getting anything like the entrance qualifications. Someone who leaves key stage 4 with only fundamental literacy - for them, how much it costs to go to university is not an issue at all. 

Teacher recruitment: An untapped pool of talent

We have a similar issue with teaching. There’s a pool of potential talent out there, which is largely untapped, because we’re not asking the right questions to the right people. 

To address this, we conducted a survey of more than 4,000 undergraduates, asking about their career intentions. We ended up with three main categories. The first were people who wouldn’t touch teaching with a bargepole: it just wasn’t something they’d thought about. They made up 42 per cent.

Then there was 58 per cent who had considered teaching as a career. Of these, only about 19 per cent were pursuing it as their career plan: they’d either applied for teacher training or were planning to.

Research that looks only at the group of people who want to be teachers tends to find that pay and conditions are important to them when they’re thinking about whether to go into teaching. But you get a different set of results when you ask people who want to become teachers and also people who don’t. 

With this broader group, approaches like cash incentives - which are there, presumably, to tempt people into the profession - don’t make any difference. They aren’t effective. Potential teachers say, “Yes, we like these incentives.” But, for someone undecided, it doesn’t make a difference. 

Things like discipline and classroom behaviour are only a factor when people come up to the starting gates and are really thinking seriously about becoming teachers. For everyone else, it doesn’t make any difference. Worries about school discipline are very specific to teachers - but, at the moment, it’s not something that’s putting people off teaching.

Neither does pay appear to be putting people off. Our undergraduates thought the starting pay for teachers was OK - and, actually, it compares pretty well with the salary for junior doctors and lawyers. And, clearly, workload isn’t putting people off - look at how hard junior doctors work.

Job security is not an issue. Workload is not an issue. Autonomy - or lack of it - is not an issue at all. (Maybe these prospective graduates think they’ll get autonomy whatever profession they end up in. These aren’t necessarily realistic aspirations - this is just how these young people think.)

Why some people consider teaching - and some don’t

What we need to tap into is why some people consider teaching, and why some don’t - if it is not to do with pay, workload, job security or poor discipline in school.

What we found was that there was an issue with prestige. You get the clichéd idea that medicine and engineering and law are respectable degree courses - why isn’t teaching seen the same way? The early pay is fairly reasonable. 

Our study found that teachers are, on average, significantly less qualified than other professionals before they go to university, and expect to get significantly lower degree classes. They come from what could be considered less-prestigious backgrounds on average across all courses - not just those on medicine, law or natural-sciences degree. 

Why is this? If you look at the criminal justice or health systems, you find people with quite different prior experiences of these systems. Whereas school is a universal childhood theme. All people have been taught. And people mistake being in the audience for being on the stage - they think they know more about education than they really do. 

And if you look at teacher-training courses, there’s a huge discrepancy between the grades required for entry to different courses and institutions. People are being turned away from teacher training in some universities, despite having much, much higher grades than the highest grades accepted elsewhere. 

Because of the way the admissions cycle works, some of those people won’t have been accepted anywhere, and will end up not going into teaching, after all. And all of that contributes towards lowering prestige, quality and numbers recruited. 

Teach First was an interesting idea, because what it initially did was to take talented graduates and throw them into teaching. They were only asked to do it for a few years - but then a high proportion enjoyed the experience, stayed on and were promoted to management positions. The scheme was attracting people who weren’t the usual suspects, which suggests that there’s untapped potential among people who just haven’t tried teaching.

Also, in teacher training, drop-outs tend to be seen as a huge disgrace for any institution. We need to change that. We need to get more people to try teacher training - and, if they drop out, then they drop out. Young people do try things, to see if they work for them. 

I’m not saying that highly talented, high-attaining people aren’t becoming teachers. Some are. But the figures show that this is not a universal phenomenon. So this issue - rather than workload or pay - is what we need to tackle, if we want to bring more, and more talented, people into teaching.

Professor Stephen Gorard is director of the Durham University Evidence Centre for Education 

This new research about career intentions, published in Educational Studies, was conducted by colleagues at the Durham University Evidence Centre for Education