Beyond recruitment: Rethinking how we build and sustain England’s teaching workforce
This month, we at the National Institute of Teaching begin our crucial task of recruiting a new cohort of talented future teachers. The Department for Education (DfE) forecasts that 29,920 new trainees are needed, and we, along with England’s other providers of postgraduate Initial Teacher Education (ITE), are tasked with recruiting and training them.
The stakes of recruiting these new teachers are high. Last December, the DfE confirmed that annual recruitment targets had been under-shot by almost one-third, continuing a multi-year pattern of gloomy results. One might imagine, given the scale of this discrepancy, that the recruitment targets set in 2025 would exceed those set in 2024, to compensate for the under-recruitment.
Not so. In fact, this year’s target of 29,920 new trainees is 19% lower than last year’s target. And in ‘shortage’ secondary subjects like Physics, this picture is even more puzzling: last year’s Physics recruitment fell short of the target by more than two-thirds, yet this year’s target is 37% down on last year’s target.
It doesn’t take a Physics teacher to figure out that one teacher shortage plus another teacher shortage should equal a bigger teacher shortage. Shouldn’t it? What could be going on here?
How easily can we address teacher shortages?
It’s important to remember that these targets are estimates of what it would take to fully wipe out any shortage in a single year. This means that even if postgraduate initial teacher training (PGITT) recruitment falls miserably below target, the teacher shortage might still have lessened. To illustrate: if we had a national shortage of 1000 Maths teachers, and we managed to recruit only enough trainees to fill 500 vacancies, then we might feel disappointed to have missed the recruitment target so badly. Yet we would have halved the national shortage in one fell swoop and so might set a lower target next year.
In practice, things are not this simple, and teacher numbers can go down as well as up. Each year, thousands of teachers retire or leave the profession for other reasons, whilst thousands more former teachers return to the classroom. In setting recruitment targets, the DfE’s experts forecast how each of these numbers-in and numbers-out will change over time. And right now, it seems that certain earlier forecasts had been a little over-pessimistic.
Consider Physics again. In 2023, the DfE’s models had forecast that around 3500 qualified Physics teachers would leave the teaching profession over a 3-year period, while around 1500 former Physics teachers would return to the profession over a similar period. In practice, it seems fewer teachers than expected have left, and more former teachers than expected have returned. These differences are small: far too small to reassure those sounding alarm bells about the crisis in supply of Physics teachers. But the differences do add up over time, meaning that hundreds of experienced Physics teachers may already be in schools above the DfE’s earlier expectations.
What this means for teacher recruitment targets
These higher numbers clearly make a difference to how many new teachers are now needed. But they make an even bigger difference to how many trainees are needed. This is because not everyone who trains to become a teacher actually becomes a teacher: some do not finish PGITT, for example, and many who qualify won’t ultimately become teachers. So, if the shortage of Physics teachers were now, say, 500 teachers smaller than previously forecast, then we might now need to recruit around 900 Physics trainees fewer than otherwise.
In short, each recruitment target depends not just on the size of the shortage, but also on how much of the shortage we think could be resolved without training new teachers. So even when the overall supply of teachers seems to have declined and the overall demand for teachers has risen, the PGITT recruitment targets may still trend downwards if these other avenues are looking healthier, as forecasters now believe to be the case.
The bigger policy picture
This answer brings home that if we want enough teachers in our nation’s classrooms in the future, then workforce policies must focus beyond teacher training alone, including through efforts to retain expert teachers who are already in schools, and to inspire former teachers back into the classroom.
But we should also keep in mind that this renewed optimism is not felt equally across the country. In many under-resourced communities—where recruiting and retaining teachers is disproportionately challenging—schools will continue to experience shortages of subject specialists long after any national shortages seem to have been “solved”. School leaders in these communities would undoubtedly benefit from a workforce planning approach that recognises where new teachers are needed, not just how many.
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