TTR0090
Written evidence submitted by the National Foundation for Educational Research
About NFER
The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) is the leading independent provider of education research and insights in the UK.
NFER welcomes the opportunity to submit written evidence to the House of Commons Education Select Committee’s inquiry into teacher recruitment, training and retention. In addressing the questions in the Call for Evidence, this submission draws on up-to-date research evidence from NFER’s extensive research portfolio on the teacher workforce. NFER’s expertise on teacher workforce issues informs education policy discourse through research, conference presentations, consultations, contributions to policy and practice development, and knowledge exchange through networking.
Jack Worth leads NFER’s work on the school workforce. Jack has written numerous publications at NFER analysing the recruitment, retention and development of teachers in England, including for the Nuffield Foundation, Gatsby Foundation and DfE. He has recently completed major programmes of grant-funded research to understand the dynamics of the teacher workforce in England [link], the impact of pay and financial incentives on teacher supply [link] and exploring the impact of teacher shortages on schools and pupils [link]. Specialising in analysis of large datasets, including the School Workforce Census, ITT Census and Labour Force Survey, Jack uses data visualisation and statistical techniques to gain insights for policy and practice.
Jack’s research is regularly cited in parliament and by media outlets, recently including the BBC, ITV, The Financial Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Mirror, TES, Schools Week and more. He has given evidence to the Education Select Committee on how schools and policymakers can better recruit and retain teachers on two occasions (most recently in February 2023) [link, link].
21 April 2023
Summary
Recruitment and retention
Government action
Teacher training and development
Teachers from different demographic backgrounds
Before the pandemic England faced a growing challenge of recruiting and retaining enough teachers to meet the need for teachers [link]. The Covid-19 pandemic somewhat eased the teacher supply challenge in the short term as more people applied to teacher training and fewer teachers left the state-sector than in previous years [link]. However, the teacher recruitment and retention challenge in England has significantly intensified since the pandemic [link].
Recruitment to initial teacher training (ITT) was considerably below target in 2022/23 across a range of subjects, meaning that not enough new teachers were entering training to meet the future need for new teachers [link]. Recruitment of secondary teachers was particularly poor, with only 59 per cent of the target numbers recruited. Recruitment of primary teachers is typically at or above target, but was only 93 per cent of the target in 2022/23.
Failing to recruit enough trainees to postgraduate teacher training programmes to meet the need for future teachers materially reduces the supply of available applicants to vacancies in the academic year after the training. NFER analysis of senior leader survey data shows that there is a significant correlation between the extent to which secondary subjects met their recruitment targets and the extent to which secondary school leaders reported that recruitment was easy or difficult for that subject in the following year [link]. In general, the subjects that outperformed their ITT recruitment target tended to have a higher recruitment ease score, and the subjects that did not meet their ITT recruitment target tended to have lower recruitment ease scores reported by schools.
The resurgent wider labour market, characterised by labour shortages in many industries and high numbers of vacancies across the economy, is undoubtedly a significant factor [link]. Potential teachers have more career options available to them outside of teaching, particularly compared to during the pandemic. However, the latest information on the number of applications to ITT courses starting in September 2023 shows that recruitment remains subdued [link]. The number of applicants to secondary courses that have accepted places is just one per cent higher than at the same point in the 2022 recruitment cycle, while the number of primary placed applicants is 17 per cent lower than the same time last year. A subdued teacher recruitment picture despite the cooling wider labour market may suggest that teaching is not attractive enough to tempt enough trainees in to the profession.
A focus on recruitment into teacher training may imply that teacher supply is primarily a recruitment issue, but retention is just as important, if not more so. The primary driver of how high the recruitment targets are is the number of teachers leaving teaching, whether that is teachers retiring or working-age teachers leaving for other reasons (other factors affecting recruitment targets such as the growth in pupil numbers are of secondary importance) [link].
The latest data on teacher retention shows that 8.1 per cent of teachers left the state-funded sector in 2021, down from a peak of 10.6 per cent in 2016 [link]. However, the leaving rate in 2020 and 2021 were both temporarily lower due to the pandemic: the leaving rate just before the pandemic was 9.4 per cent. Data on teacher retention reflecting the post-pandemic situation has not yet been published by the Department for Education.
A further breakdown of the data shows that the number of teachers retiring has been steadily declining since 2010, which continued into the pandemic. In 2020/21, around one per cent of teachers retired, compared to around three per cent in 2010/11. In contrast, the number of working-age teachers leaving has increased markedly over the decade, by over two percentage points by the 2016/17 peak, before falling back. The key to understanding recent trends in retention rates, and to addressing them in future, is the leaving behaviour of working-age teachers
The number of teacher vacancies posted by schools offers an up-to-date glimpse of how leaving rates may have changed during the post-pandemic period [link]. Data on teacher vacancies collected by TeachVac, a teacher job board and data scraping service [link], shows that in the 2021/22 academic year the number of job vacancies for primary and secondary classroom teachers posted by state-sector schools in England was significantly higher than in previous years. By the end of the year, schools had posted 59 per cent more jobs than in 2018/19, the last year before the pandemic. This trend has continued into the 2022/23 academic year. In February 2023, teacher vacancies were 93 per cent higher than at the same point in the year before the pandemic and 37 per cent higher than in 2021/22.
Trends in recruitment and retention are both affected by the overall attractiveness of the teaching profession. The attractiveness of teaching is influenced by many factors, key ones being financial attractiveness and working conditions.
A key factor affecting both recruitment and retention is the level of pay. Recent NFER research has established a relationship between higher competitiveness of teacher pay relative to the pay of subject-specific alternative graduate career paths and greater interest in entering teacher training [link]. In other words, when teacher pay grows faster than outside earnings then teaching becomes more attractive and, all else equal, more people are attracted into teacher training. In contrast, when teacher pay is growing less fast than outside earnings, fewer trainees are likely to enter the profession. DfE’s review of the research literature concludes a similar relationship between teacher pay relative to outside earnings and teacher retention [link]. Since 2010, teachers’ pay has grown less fast than earnings outside teaching, whether measured as the average earnings in the UK economy or more tailored measures such as similar graduates or professional occupations [link]. This is very likely to have contributed to the growing teacher supply challenges of the last decade.
A key factor for retention is teacher workload. Unmanageable workload is consistently the most cited reason ex-teachers give for why they left the profession [link]. Teachers in England work longer hours than similar individuals in other professions in a working week and are more likely to report wanting to work fewer hours [link]. Teachers in England also work more hours and spend more time on non-teaching tasks than the average teacher in OECD countries [link]. However, there has been progress in reducing workload over recent years. Average working hours of a full-time teacher in a typical working week have fallen from a peak of 48.1 hours in 2017/18 to 45.3 hours in 2021/22 [link]. The proportion of full-time teachers saying they would like to work fewer hours has fallen from 62 per cent to 53 per cent over the same period. This has also coincided with a fall in teacher leaving rates, from a peak of 10.6 per cent in 2016 to 9.4 per cent in 2019 [link].
The similar trends in workload-related factors and teacher leaving rates suggests that workload reduction in the years before the pandemic could be a significant factor for explaining why retention rates improved slightly. Another commonly-cited reason ex-teachers give for why they left teaching is government initiatives and policy changes [link]. The first half of the 2010s saw a large amount of education policy change in England, such as the revised national curriculum, new assessments and school accountability measures, and a revised Ofsted inspection framework. The pace of new policy initiatives in education slowed considerably after the 2015 general election. The slowdown in the pace of new policy initiatives, and the bedding in of earlier policy changes, from 2016 onwards also coincides with the fall in the teacher leaving rate between 2016/17 and 2018/19. It is therefore also a plausible factor that could have contributed to the fall in the leaving rate. Indeed, the implementation of policy initiatives may have contributed to the increase in teacher workload, which was, in turn, associated with an increase in leaving rates during the 2010s.
Unmanageable workload is a more complex concept than simply the number of hours worked or perceptions about working hours. It also relates to what tasks and activities teachers are doing, how much influence they feel they have over their work and the expectations placed on them by senior leaders and the wider system. Evidence from the DfE 2019 Teacher Workload Survey shows that not only did overall average working hours reduce between 2016 and 2019, but the most significant reductions in teachers’ working time were on activities relating to planning and preparation, marking and data recording and monitoring [link].
These are all activities that teachers report that they spend too much time on. Further, teachers spending more time on planning and marking is associated with lower well-being [link]. It seems quite possible that the work of the independent workload review groups and the resulting support and guidance for schools, may have contributed to these reported reductions [link]. However, despite these reductions, most teachers said they still felt they spent too much time on planning, marking, data management and general administrative work. DfE’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders (WLTL) survey shows that some further progress in reducing workload has been made since 2019, but that working hours remain high and teachers continue to report spending too much time on non-teaching activities such as admin, data recording, planning and marking [link].
Finally, the availability of flexible working is a factor affecting the relative attractiveness of teaching compared to alternative careers. Part-time working is not as a prevalent in teaching as it is in other industries, which is problematic for teaching’s attractiveness as part-time roles are more likely to be demanded by women and teaching is majority female [link]. Part-time working opportunities are less available in secondary schools than in primary schools, primarily due to the complexities of timetabling and managing staffing in a consistent way in larger organisations [link]. The proportion of secondary teachers working part-time increases by twenty percentage points after teachers leave, which suggests that some teachers are motivated to leave teaching by a desire for part-time working that is not being met in their teaching job [link].
Further, flexible working arrangements have become increasingly prevalent in the wider labour market in recent years, as widespread office closures during the pandemic led to the rapid adoption of home working [link]. However, while working from home may work well for many office-based occupations, it is much less well-suited to teaching. Data from the LFS shows that the pandemic did not substantively affect the prevalence of home working for teachers, while the proportion of similar graduates who reported mainly working from home increased rapidly from about 15 per cent up to 2018/19 to 44 per cent in 2021/22. While teachers do report the availability of other flexible working options, such as lesson planning, preparation and marking off-site, the lack of availability of working from home may represent an important threat to the overall attractiveness of teaching for new recruits, but most importantly for retaining existing teachers.
Recruitment and retention challenges are not uniform by phase and subject. Recruitment tends to be more challenging for secondary than for primary, and within secondary the greatest challenges are concentrated in particular shortage subjects. However, in 2022/23, all but four subjects failed to meet their recruitment targets, highlighting the deep set of challenges affecting the whole teaching workforce [link].
Recruitment is most challenging in STEM subjects such as physics, chemistry, computing and maths. These subjects have faced long-standing shortages, including all four failing to reach their recruitment targets since 2015. These subjects also have high leaving rates: all four subjects have leaving rates that are higher than average.
A key explanation for why these subjects in particular tend to struggle with recruitment is the high wages that graduates in these subjects can earn outside of teaching. Teacher pay is not differentiated by subject, so the relative earnings gap between teaching and other careers varies by subject. For example, DfE data on post-graduation earnings shows that the average graduate five years after graduation earned £28,200 in 2019/20, while the equivalent figures for maths and physics graduates was £36,200 and chemistry and computing graduates was £31,800 [link]. In contrast, a teacher outside of London in 2019/20 four years after qualifying (an approximation for five years after graduation) was earning £30,600.
Modern foreign languages (MFL) has also failed to meet its recruitment target since 2012/13, due to targets being set very high to deliver the number of teachers required to ensure 90% of pupils are studying EBacc subjects by 2025. STEM subjects and MFL have typically attracted high bursaries to attract more teachers in to training.
Some other subjects have struggled to meet their recruitment targets over the last decade despite having no bursary, or a modest level of bursary. These include religious education and music (met their respective targets once since 2012/13, which was at the height of the pandemic), design and technology (has not met its target since 2011/12) and art and design (failed to meet its target between 2015/16 and 2019/20). These subjects appear to have been de-prioritised for bursary support due to not being EBacc subjects.
Mathematics has been a recent focus given the Prime Minister’s ambition for more young people to study maths to age 18. Jack Worth from NFER gave evidence to the committee’s session on this [link] and made some key points regarding recruitment and retention. Most importantly, to meet this ambition the maths recruitment target would need to be considerably higher than it currently is, alongside a plan for how the additional teachers are going to be recruited and retained.
Schools with high levels of disadvantage find it more challenging to retain teachers and show more signs of experiencing teacher shortages [link]. NFER analysis shows that schools with higher levels of pupil disadvantage (measured by the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals) have higher teacher attrition (leaving) and turnover rates compared to other schools. The data also shows that schools with higher levels of disadvantage spend more per pupil on supply teachers and have more unfilled vacancies and temporarily-filled posts. It also shows they are more likely to have maths lessons taught by teachers without maths undergraduate degrees (excluding teaching degrees such as PGCE/ BEd, so excludes those with quantitative degree backgrounds such as economics or science) – 61 per cent in the most deprived schools compared to 46 per cent in the least deprived – and science lessons taught by teachers without science undergraduate degrees (nine per cent in the most deprived schools compared to five per cent in the least deprived).
This suggests that schools with higher levels of disadvantage tend to find recruiting teachers more challenging and have to take more actions to mitigate the impact of teacher shortages. Deploying non-specialists to teach a subject is likely to have negative implications for the quality of the pupils’ learning in the classroom, as having deep and fluent knowledge and flexible understanding of the content you are teaching is an important element of effective teaching (see section 1.4 for more detail on this).
The difficulties that schools with higher levels of disadvantage face in recruiting and retaining teachers are likely to be impacting on pupils’ education and learning, and contributing at least in part to the gap in educational outcomes between pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and their more affluent peers. Therefore, solutions to the national teacher supply challenge have important links to the challenges of levelling up educational outcomes, increasing social mobility and closing the disadvantage gap.
The Government’s levelling up premium policy of early-career payments for retention tilts the level of support for early-career teachers towards schools with a high level of disadvantage [link]. This is to be encouraged, given the particular challenges faced by these schools.
The level of support is also tilted towards schools in Education Investment Areas (EIAs), which are areas where ‘educational outcomes are currently weakest’, as well as ‘other local authorities containing existing place-based interventions’ [link]. However, the data shows that there is very little discernible difference in teacher retention and shortage measures between schools within Education Investment Areas, compared with other areas [link]. NFER has called for the policy to be applied nationwide, rather than targeted at EIAs, in order to further boost retention in these subjects [link]. Another reason for expanding the programme would be that the issue it is targeting is one common to all schools, not schools in EIAs specifically.
Indeed, the data on teacher retention and shortages does not paint a clear picture of where potential geographical ‘cold spots’ can be found. For example, the Blackpool TTWA had a high proportion of secondary science lessons taught by teachers without a science degree in 2019, as did Hastings, Bude, Isle of Wight and Barrow-in-Furness.
However, the rate of secondary teachers leaving the state-funded sector in 2020 was below average for Blackpool, Bude, Isle of Wight and Barrow-in-Furness. While the teacher attrition rate was higher than average in Hastings, the proportion of maths lessons taught by a teacher with a maths degree in 2019 was around average. This picture chimes with the findings from the statistical analysis of teacher supply challenges by the Department for Education in 2017, which concluded that ‘we can see no strong geographic trends in teacher supply issues, showing that it is a school level issue’ [link].
One area that was consistently different in its teacher retention and shortage metrics is London. NFER research has highlighted the particular challenges of the London teacher labour market, and the data confirms that this picture continued into 2020 [link]. London has a higher attrition rate, turnover rate, vacancy rate and expenditure per pupil on supply teaching than the national average. However, the proportion of maths and science teaching hours taught by specialists is similar to the national average.
Overall, the data suggests that the geographical picture on teacher supply and shortages is complex, but providing long-term, well-targeted and adequately funded support to schools in disadvantaged areas is necessary to adequately address teacher workforce gaps, and ultimately pupil attainment gaps.
There are consequences of schools finding teacher recruitment more challenging due to high turnover and under-recruitment [link]. ‘Staff shortages’ in practice rarely means classrooms without teachers in them; school leaders have a range of actions they can take to mitigate the impact of recruitment difficulties on the school and its pupils. However, many of these actions are likely to have negative implications for pupils’ education and learning.
Schools that report finding it the most difficult to recruit teachers also report that their key recruitment challenges are being unable to assemble a field of quality applicants and experiencing issues with the suitability/ quality of staff applying. In contrast, schools that report finding teacher recruitment relatively easier do not report these factors as key challenges to the same extent. This suggests that the quantity and quality of applicants to vacancies is the primary challenge linked to an overall sense of recruitment difficulty. While other challenges affecting recruitment, such as budget pressures or school/ geographical context issues, influence school leaders’ overall sense of the challenge to some extent, it is the response they get to vacancies that is the most significant.
Faced with a low-quality field of applicants, senior leaders can either hire a teacher that applies but that may be less than ideal, or not hire at all and mitigate the impact of the resulting shortage. Schools that report finding teacher recruitment the most difficult are considerably more likely than other schools to report recruiting less-experienced-than-ideal teachers, and more likely to employ unqualified teachers than they normally would. Recruiting inexperienced or unqualified teachers may have negative implications for teaching quality.
However, not hiring a teacher in such a situation also has potential negative consequences for the school and pupils. A key mitigation strategy used in secondary schools when teacher recruitment is difficult is deploying non-specialist teachers to teach certain subjects. Among three key shortage subjects we explored in a senior leader survey, schools reported high levels of non-specialists teaching maths (45 per cent reporting at least ‘some’ lessons) and physics (39 per cent reporting at least ‘some’ lessons), with a smaller but notable proportion of modern foreign languages (MFL) lessons being taught by non-specialists (17 per cent reporting at least ‘some’ lessons.
Deployment of non-specialist teachers is far more prevalent in schools that report finding teacher recruitment the most difficult, compared to other schools. In the schools in our survey that reported finding teacher recruitment the most difficult, 62 per cent reported at least ‘some’ maths lessons being taught by non-specialists, 55 per cent for physics and 26 per cent for MFL.
Schools that reported finding teacher recruitment the most difficult are also considerably more likely than other schools to have school leaders doing more teaching than usual. This may reduce the school’s leadership capacity and, in turn, limit the schools’ ability to function well operationally and make improvements to teaching.
There was also some evidence from our survey of schools that reported finding teacher recruitment the most difficult being more likely than other schools to reduce non-contact time for existing teachers, with implications for their workload, stress, ability to engage in CPD and potentially for retention as a result.
There was mixed evidence of secondary schools using curriculum changes – such as reducing the offer of triple science or MFL qualifications to some or all pupils – to mitigate teacher shortages. Teacher under-supply was not a key reason given by senior leaders in the survey for why not all pupils were studying MFL, even in schools that reported finding teacher recruitment the most difficult. However, sufficient supply of science teachers appears to be an important factor for some schools deciding not to offer triple science to any pupils (alongside pupil interest in studying sciences, which is a major factor reported in the survey).
Overall, failing to meet the teacher training recruitment targets has a knock-on effect in the teacher labour market, which leads school leaders to take actions to mitigate the impact of teacher shortages on staffing in their schools. Many of these actions may be associated with negative implications for teaching quality and/or school improvement, which in turn may be acting as a drag on system-wide improvement of pupil outcomes. This is likely to have a negative impact on longer-term skill development and supply, particularly in STEM subjects, and ultimately on long-term economic growth.
As noted above, schools with higher levels of disadvantage face greater challenges of recruiting and retaining teachers, which are, in turn, likely to be impacting on pupils’ education and learning. This is therefore likely to be contributing at least in part to the gap in educational outcomes between pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and their more affluent peers. Therefore, solutions to the national teacher supply challenge have important links to the challenges of levelling up educational outcomes, increasing social mobility and closing the disadvantage gap.
The Government should take urgent action to improve the attractiveness of the teaching profession, to promote increased recruitment and higher retention. We believe this action should concentrate on a number of key areas.
As noted above, teacher pay has lost competitiveness compared to the wider labour market since 2010, and current Government pay proposals do not address this gap [link]. Narrowing the gap between teacher pay and the wider labour market is key to supporting recruitment and retention. The 2023 pay award should therefore exceed the 4.1 per cent forecasted rise in earnings in the wider labour market, and the Government should also develop a long-term strategy for pay setting which reduces the gap in earnings with competing occupations. Crucially, the Government should ensure that schools have sufficient funding to enact these pay increases without making cuts elsewhere.
Reducing teacher workload has been a significant policy objective in recent years and teachers’ working hours and perceived workload has fallen over time. However, in 2021/22, working hours and perceived workload remained significantly higher than in other occupations. Workload remains a key reason why teachers consider leaving the profession, and teacher autonomy, one facet of workload related to how manageable workload feels, has consistently remained lower for teachers compared to similar graduates. We therefore recommend that the Government continue to remain focussed on reducing teacher workload by supporting schools in implementing the recommendations of the Teacher Workload Advisory Groups.
The pandemic has led to widespread changes in work routines. Nearly half of graduates in 2021/22 reported that they mainly worked from home, while the prevalence of home working arrangements for teachers remained very limited. The Government should fund further research to better understand teachers’ flexible working preferences and use the findings to revisit the 2019 Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy, ensuring it reflects the new post-pandemic realities of working life.
There are substantial numbers of qualified teachers of working age who are not in active service in the state sector: estimated to be around 365,000 in 2018. However, this is not a large supply of ex-teachers ready and willing to return to the classroom. The Government has established a number of schemes aimed at attracting returners back into the classroom. However, NFER’s evaluation of a 2015 pilot scheme found that while the programme was successful in attracting people to register an interest in returning and supported some qualified teachers to return to teaching, the number of returners was low and the scheme was unlikely to represent good value for money [link]. The lack of success was primarily due to issues with timing, recruitment challenges and the suitability of some participants, as well as a lack of practical teaching opportunities available in some of the participating schools.
The research evidence shows very clearly that bursaries are effective at increasing interest in entering teacher training and leads to more trainees being trained. The National Audit Office reported in 2016 that DfE analysis found that ‘an increase of £1,000 in bursary value led to a 2.9% increase in applications’ [link]. Recent analysis by NFER has confirmed this finding [link, link].
In October 2022 the DfE announced a new set of bursaries, with increases for maths, physics, computing and chemistry from £24,000 to £27,000, for MFL, classics and geography from £15,000 to £25,000, design and technology from £15,000 to £20,000, biology from £10,000 to £20,000 and English from £0 to £15,000 [link]. While it is still early in the application cycle, the bursary increases appear to be having a somewhat positive effect on those subjects. As of February 2023, placed applicants in subjects that received a bursary increase were 13 per cent higher than the same time in the previous year [link]. Placed applicants in subjects which did not receive a bursary increase were 10 per cent lower than in the previous year.
However, what is unclear from the research evidence to date is the extent to which the additional teachers who enter training as a result of bursary increases subsequently enter the state sector and are retained in teaching long-term. This will be the focus of a new piece of research NFER are undertaking with the Gatsby Foundation, and we will report the findings to the committee’s inquiry if the information from our analysis becomes available in time.
There is also good evidence that early-career payments are effective at increasing retention. Research has shown that the trial of early-career retention payments for maths and physics successfully led to higher retention of early-career teachers [link].
According to the best currently available evidence, financial incentives targeted at hard-to-recruit subjects have good evidence that they are effective at their immediate objectives, suggesting that they need to remain a part of the teacher supply policy toolkit. However, given the extent of the recruitment challenge the system faces in STEM subjects, the design of these policies could be enhanced to add further gains.
For example, the levelling up premium is targeted at early-career teachers in schools in education investment areas (EIAs – identified by the Government as geographical areas with low pupil attainment) and with high proportions of pupils on free school meals. However, as noted above, NFER analysis suggests that there is very little difference in average teacher retention rates between EIAs and areas that are not EIAs. While these areas have been identified as having low pupil attainment, which merits policy focus and attention, the primary policy mechanism of using early-career payments to increase teacher retention in shortage subjects may not be being targeted at the areas where this is a key issue that these schools face. Given the evidence about the policy’s effectiveness at improving retention, rolling the scheme out to all schools nationally could further increase the benefit. However, the acute staffing challenges facing schools with higher levels of disadvantage does support the continued targeting of higher early-career payments at schools with higher levels of disadvantage.
The evaluation of the Early Career Framework (ECF) national roll-out shows that while participation is high among early-career teachers and induction training is rated highly, early-career teachers perceive that the programme structure can be inflexible and lack content that is tailored to individual needs and school contexts [link]. The programme has also been found to often duplicate content that trainees covered in their ITT programme.
The evaluation also found that while mentoring is recognised as making a key contribution to effective induction, the ECF had added to mentors’ workload when they are experienced teachers dealing simultaneously with other pressures of their jobs. The consequences of this workload pressure included not prioritising mentor training and not finding the time to meet with mentees and observe their lessons.
NFER are currently undertaking an evaluation of the ECF early roll-out (ERO) [link]. The ERO was a pilot, introduced in some areas in 2020, for one year prior to the national roll-out. We are aiming to assess the impact of the ECF on teacher retention, by comparing early-career teachers who received the ECF during the ERO with otherwise similar teachers in schools in non-eligible areas. The ECF ERO cohort finished their two-year induction at the end of the 2021/22 academic year, and we will be assessing their retention using data from the 2022 School Workforce Census. The national roll-out cannot be evaluated in a similarly robust way because there is no comparison group of teachers who did not receive the ECF to compare outcomes with.
NFER research on teacher autonomy shows that greater teacher involvement in professional development goal‑setting could improve their motivation, job satisfaction and retention [link]. Teachers report a low level of autonomy over their professional development goals. Only a quarter (23 per cent) report having ‘a lot’ of influence and 38 per cent report ‘a little’ or ‘none’.
Teachers having a sense of autonomy and influence over their work activities is generally associated with higher job satisfaction and a greater intention to stay in teaching, as well as being strongly related to the extent to which teachers regard their workload as manageable. Our analysis found that teachers’ autonomy over their professional development goals is the aspect of their practice that is most associated with higher job satisfaction and retention. All else equal, a one-point increase (e.g., changing from ‘some’ influence to ‘a lot’) in influence over teachers’ professional development goals is associated with a nine percentage point increase in their intention to stay in teaching.
Together, the findings suggest that increasing teachers’ autonomy over their professional development goals has great potential for increasing teacher job satisfaction and retention.
Evidence from the OECD’s 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) study shows that most teachers in England feel well or very well prepared by their ITT in key competencies such as classroom practices, pedagogy and classroom management [link]. Teachers in England are generally close to the OECD average in terms of their reported preparedness to teach from their ITT. Primary and lower-secondary teachers in England felt more confident in their readiness to teach mixed-ability classes and in multicultural settings than teachers in other countries.
A high proportion of teachers in England (82 per cent) reported they feel their recent professional development activities had a positive impact on their teaching practices, which was the same as the OECD average. However, 56 per cent of lower-secondary teachers in England saw expense as a barrier to their participation in professional development, while 64% highlighted conflicts with their work schedule. These figures were both above the OECD average (45% and 54% respectively).
While teachers in England spend considerably more time on non-teaching activities than teachers in other countries – especially on tasks such as marking, lesson planning and preparation and administration – teachers spend less time on professional development. Secondary teachers reported an average of 1.1 hour per week spent on professional development, compared to an OECD average of 1.6 hours.
There are undoubtedly recruitment and retention challenges in other sectors across the economy, due to labour shortages in the post-pandemic labour market. Having been around 800,000 before the pandemic, and falling to a low of 330,000 during the first lockdown, the number of vacancies rose during 2021 to a peak of 1.3 million in mid-2022. These numbers fell back in late 2022 and early 2023, but remain above pre-pandemic levels in the latest (Jan-Mar 2023) data at 1.1 million.
Workforce pressures are acute in many areas across the public sector. The Institute for Government’s Performance Tracker highlights staffing challenges in social care, the NHS, courts as well as schools [link]. A consistent factor across the public sector is pay growing by less than average earnings, which tends to lead to increasing recruitment and retention challenges due to decreasing financial competitiveness. Therefore, it is as true for other public sector professions as it is for teaching that long-term strategies are needed to improve pay competitiveness in order to attract and retain the staff that are needed to run services.
NFER, in partnership with Ambition Institute and Teach First, recently conducted a landmark study of the representation and career progression opportunities in the teaching profession in England among people from different ethnic minority backgrounds [link]. We found that there is under-representation of people from ethnic minority backgrounds that is most pronounced at senior leadership and headship levels, but largely driven by disparities in the early career stages, particularly initial teacher training (ITT). For example, ITT applicants from black ethnic backgrounds are 21 percentage points less likely to be accepted to a postgraduate ITT course than their white counterparts. Trainees from a black ethnic background are also five percentage points less likely to complete Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) than their white counterparts.
The data clearly shows that under-representation of ethnic minority groups is greatest at the senior leadership and headship level. We find significant ethnic disparities in promotion to all areas of leadership: for example, Asian middle leaders are three percentage points less likely to be promoted to senior leadership than their white counterparts, and middle leaders from black ethnic backgrounds are four percentage points less likely. There is significant action required right across the system to address the under-representation of senior leaders from ethnic minority backgrounds, including the most substantial work being required in ITT and the early career stages. Addressing the barriers in early career stages would enable more representative cohorts of teachers to progress within the teacher career pipeline and into leadership.
The study shows that people from Asian, black and other ethnic backgrounds are over-represented among applicants to postgraduate ITT, suggesting there is no lack of interest in entering teaching among these groups. It is the significant disparities in progression between ethnic groups within teaching that results in the pronounced under-representation at senior leadership and headship levels. These disparities typically arise during processes within organisations, such as recruitment, selection and promotion. Leaders and decision-makers in ITT providers, schools and trusts can play a central role in addressing ethnic disparities by creating environments where trainees and teachers from diverse backgrounds are equally able to thrive. A critical measure for addressing ethnic disparities is therefore to support leaders to equip them to make equitable workforce decisions.
To determine whether people from a particular ethnic group are over- or under-represented in each career stage, we took an approach of comparing the proportion of the workforce from that ethnic group (for example, ten per cent of classroom teachers are from Asian ethnic backgrounds) to the age-adjusted proportion of the overall population made up of people from the same ethnic group. People from a particular ethnic group are over-represented in a teacher career stage when they make up a larger proportion of the teacher workforce at that stage than they do of the overall age-adjusted population, and vice versa.
An alternative view of representation would be to consider whether teachers from different ethnic backgrounds are under- or over-represented compared to the ethnic backgrounds of the pupils they teach. The population of people in England from Asian, black, mixed and other ethnic backgrounds is younger than people from white ethnic backgrounds, which means that the population of school-age pupils is more ethnically diverse than the population overall. Therefore, teachers from ethnic minorities other than white that are under-represented relative to the national picture (as we found for all ethnic groups except white at all career stages except for ITT applicants) are even more under-represented compared to the ethnic backgrounds of the pupils they teach.
April 2023