Great teaching is the most powerful lever schools have to improve children’s education, according to the Education Endowment Foundation. So, how the education system recruits, trains, retains and supports teachers is one of the most important questions for politicians and policymakers – far more so than the structural reforms Westminster and Whitehall too often obsess over.
Yet schools in England have been facing a worsening teacher recruitment and retention crisis for over a decade, and pupil to teacher ratios have risen, particularly in secondary schools. Last year, the teaching workforce grew by fewer than 300 teachers. Too few teachers makes it harder for those in the profession to do their jobs well – further adding to workload and behaviour management pressures, and undermining retention even more. More than a million pupils are now in classes of more than 30. Shortages of teachers in several important specialist subjects at secondary school, including physics, computing and foreign languages mean that teachers without a relevant qualification are having to teach them, and some schools are having to limit subject provision.
The government has a significant challenge on its hands. Its response has focused around two main planks. It has pledged an extra 6,500 expert teachers in key subjects, funded by introducing VAT on private school fees. And the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, says that all teachers should have the right to spend time working more flexibly away from the classroom, on lesson preparation, marking and pupil assessment, to make teaching a more attractive and sustainable profession. This follows the government including a provision in its new children’s wellbeing bill, published this week, that would give non-academy schools the same freedom to allow flexible working for teachers that academies already have.
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These are welcome moves, but they cannot address the recruitment and retention crisis unless part of a more comprehensive plan. We do not know yet over what period the government expects to meet its pledge of 6,500 extra teachers; but, given more fundamental issues around pay and workload, it will be difficult to achieve, especially in the context of the 40,000 or so teachers who leave the workforce every year. While the lack of flexibility certainly makes teaching less attractive as a profession – a growing number of teachers who are thinking of leaving cite it as a reason – there are obvious limits to how much this can change in a job that centres around teacher-pupil interaction.
The teacher retention crisis cannot be fixed without addressing the bread-and-butter issues of pay and workload. Even after pay increases of 6.5% this year and 5.5% last year, teacher pay remains 9% lower in real terms than it was in 2010; falling real pay inevitably affects recruitment and retention. Moreover, the 2.8% pay rise for next year that the government has said would be appropriate won’t be fully funded; schools will need to find some of the cash from existing budgets. And, despite improvements, heavy workload remains the most common reason that teachers give for leaving the profession, with teachers having to spend more time addressing issues that would typically fall outside the remit of schools, such as social and mental health services, as a result of cuts to other services and growing need after the pandemic.
And so it is back to the dilemma the government faces across so much ofthe public sector. More resources are needed, but ministers say there are none to be found. Nobody can deny the unenviable fiscal and economic inheritance bequeathed to Labour by the last government. But investing in a quality teaching workforce cannot be done on the cheap.
