An education research body has concluded that Labour’s plans for recruitment in education offer more likelihood of tackling the growing recruitment crisis in schools.
The National Foundation for Educational Research examined the commitments of Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Greens around recruitment and retention in the education sphere.
The NFER praised Labour’s pledge for 6,500 more teachers and £450m spending commitment, despite a lack of timescale. It noted that education shadow Bridget Phillipson had previously laid out plans to spend additional money on early-career retention payments (ECRPs), including a new £2,400 payment to teachers for completing the two-year early career framework induction programme.
Researchers first studied the impact on teacher supply of spending this money on teacher pay, through an additional uplift in 2025/26. Second, they examined the impact on teacher supply of spending it on a combination of measures, including a smaller pay uplift, increased bursaries and ECRPs, introducing the new £2,400 payment for third-year teachers and further increasing the spend on the current “levelling up premium”.
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This latter option, said the report authors, would have greater impact, particularly in subjects that were currently below target, because “measures that are targeted at shortage subjects have a greater impact on under-supply because they do not entail a ‘deadweight’ cost of allocating spending to subjects that are already at or above target.” The NFER’s own research showed that bursaries and early-career payments were more cost-effective than pay increases, “because they focus resource on groups of teachers that are particularly responsive to financial inducements.”
Measures to support teachers’ mental health and reduce workload were also likely to increase retention but changes to the curriculum risked increasing workload, said report author Jack Worth. But overall, Labour’s “6,500 new expert teachers” pledge signalled “that improving teacher supply is a high priority”.
Recognition that measures needed to be targeted at subjects in need, such as physics, were welcome. However, detail on how the £450m would be spent and how policies such as Ofsted reform and mental health support would be implemented, were slight, said Worth.
The Conservative manifesto also pledges to reduce teacher workload, said Worth, but the party’s manifesto framed the challenge as being about “attract[ing] more talented teachers”, having introduced starting salaries of £30,000 and achieved “record numbers of teachers, 27,000 more than 2010”.
The teacher recruitment and retention measures put forward by the Conservatives were all existing policy announcements, the NFER pointed out, including the increased levelling up premium payments for teachers in their first five years, focused on shortage subjects and schools with more disadvantaged pupil intakes. The Conservative manifesto also stated that the party would “protect day-to-day schools spending in real terms per pupil”. This, said Worth, implied that without cuts elsewhere in school budgets, the government would not award above-inflation pay rises.
Both of the Conservatives’ main policies were already factored in to the NFER’s baseline scenario, which suggests that teacher supply is likely to remain significantly below target both for primary and many secondary subjects. Therefore, the research body concluded the manifesto did not make any additional pledges on the financial attractiveness of teaching, over and above what is already in train.
The Liberal Democrat manifesto proposed to “reform the School Teachers’ Review Body to make it properly independent of government and able to recommend fair pay rises for teachers”.
The party also said it would fund teacher training properly “so that all trainee posts in school are paid”. According to DfE ITT data, about 3,000 trainees in 2023/24 had a salary and 8,500 trainees had a bursary of at least £10,000, while 10,500 had no bursary or salary.
Crucially, however, most “unpaid’ trainees, were in primary, which had historically recruited at or above its target, and others were in subjects such as history and PE in which there were not teacher shortages. “The reason they don’t have a salary or a bursary is that enough trainees can usually be attracted without needing one,” said Worth, who felt that the Lib Dems’ policies would have the effect of increasing supply in several subjects that tend to over-recruit, while not, on its own, improving the recruitment and retention of key shortage subjects such as physics, computing and chemistry.
The Green party manifesto pledges £2bn for a pay uplift for teachers, making the clearest commitment among the party manifestos on teacher pay. Such a figure was likely to improve teacher supply across the board, through both increases in recruitment and retention, said Worth.
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The study noted that Reform UK did not have a policy on teacher recruitment and retention beyond doubling the number of pupil referral units, which would require a lot of extra staff and potentially help retention in mainstream schools.
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