Schools in crisis as graduates turn their backs on teaching

Britain’s leading expert on school recruitment has warned that a shortage of trainee teachers is reaching crisis levels in some of the most important subjects in the curriculum.

In evidence submitted to the parliamentary education select committee, TeachVac, an independent vacancy-matching and monitoring service for education professionals, said that it had identified a “woeful” lack of new teachers in several key secondary school subjects.

Its founder, Professor John Howson, who has conducted research into the labour market for teachers since the early 1980s, said that 2015 would go down as the year when a new teacher supply crisis started. He predicted that the shortage of trainees would worsen as pupil numbers rose and cash-strapped graduates, unable to afford homes, turned their backs on teaching.

The secondary school population fell throughout the last parliament because of a declining birth rate but is now predicted to rise. The School Teachers Review Body claims that it will be 17% higher in 2023 than it was last year.

“By the beginning of the 2020s we will have more children in secondary schools than we’ve ever had in the history of education,” Howson said.

Figures compiled by TeachVac suggest there is already a crisis in recruiting trainee teachers for several subjects in England’s secondary schools, even before the pupil population increases.

Based on its figures, the organisation has identified an 85% shortfall in the number of trainee teachers needed to fill vacancies in both business studies and social sciences. The number of new teachers for design and technology is also more than a third below what it needs to be and there is a 10% shortfall in the number of IT teachers required.

Howson said a failure to recruit new teachers for subjects such as design, business studies and IT would have an impact on the country’s economic performance. “These are potentially crucial subjects for the 50% of the school leaving population who won’t be going to university but will he heading straight into the labour market.”

According to TeachVac, there are also challenges ahead in recruiting science, music, religious education and English teachers. In contrast, there are currently too many PE and art teacher recruits chasing too few jobs.

The biggest shortfall in teacher numbers was in London and the home counties, regions where wages have struggled to keep up with house prices.

Of the 18,704 vacancies in England, TeachVac reported that 3,583 were in London and 3,727 were in the south-east. New financial pressures are expected to make filling these vacancies difficult.

Howson said that the autumn statement had revealed plans to save £1bn on procurement costs in the education sector over the life of this parliament and that much of the saving would come from recruitment budgets.

At the same time, economists are predicting that wages and salaries in the private sector will increase by 4% a year, while the government is committed to restricting public sector salary growth to an average 1%.

“It makes teaching much less attractive as a career,” Howson said. “The history of teaching suggests that, if you allow public-sector salaries to get too far out of line with the private sector, you fail to recruit graduates.”

Other factors were also conspiring to place pressures on teaching, he suggested. A trend for middle-aged teachers to become private tutors was stripping the profession of experienced people, while younger teachers were being wooed abroad.

“If I were a 25-year-old teaching in London and earning a salary that meant I couldn’t buy a flat, the prospect of going to Dubai or Beijing tax-free and earning the deposit for a flat would look very attractive,” Howson said. “The risk is that, having been overseas, you’ll want to stay and never come back.”

A major concern is that the profession is losing its appeal to female graduates. “Between 2005 and 2015, we lost 10,000 applicants to teaching, and the bulk of those losses were women,” Howson said. “With teaching now starting to be seen as a less attractive career, we’re beginning to get to a situation where, if this turns into a flood, the challenges we’ve got will become even more serious.

“The risk for the government is that they start to create a two-tier education system. Successful schools will be successful in recruiting teachers, but more challenging schools, where discipline or outcomes are worse, may face real difficulties.”

However, a spokesman from the Department for Education said the number and quality of teachers was now at an all-time high. “With the economy improving, we have redoubled our efforts to attract top graduates to the profession – particularly in the core academic subjects that help children reach their potential – and we have over 1,000 more graduates training in secondary subjects, with record levels of those trainees holding a first-class degree. We have exceeded our target for primary school trainees and made sustained progress in the secondary sector – including in key subjects such as English, maths, physics and chemistry, where we are ahead of last year’s performance.”