Government plans to recruit 6,500 new teachers would require a salary increase of nearly 10% a year for three years, if using pay as a sole incentive.
A new analysis by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) suggests this would cost an additional £2.1bn next year (2025-26), rising to £4.9bn in 2026-27 and £7.7bn from 2027-28 onwards. The report takes the view that in the current financial climate, such spending would be unlikely so it highlights the potential for alternative lower-cost options.
Such options would either rely on cost-effective spending on targeted measures aimed at shortage subjects, particularly bursaries and early career retention payments (ECRPs), or on non-financial measures such as reducing workload or improving continuing professional development (CPD).
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The 2024 Labour party manifesto pledged to recruit 6,500 new expert teachers in key subjects, but without setting out a detailed definition of how this supply target would be measured or delivered. Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has since committed to delivering the recruitment target over the course of the five-year parliament.
The NFER report, How to Recruit 6,500 Teachers? provides detailed analysis of potential policy choices for the government, with estimated costs.
The analysis, funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, explores the role of financial policy levers, such as pay, bursaries and ECRPs, and non-financial measures, such as workload reduction, in meeting the teacher supply target.
According to the research, targeted measures aimed at shortage subjects, such as physics, could include an expanded set of retention payments that are available to a wider set of teachers. For example, these payments could be made available to teachers of shortage subjects in all secondary schools and/or those with more than five years’ experience.
The research goes on to say the recruitment target is also unlikely to be met without new policies. Many current policy measures would not be sufficient to meet the supply target in isolation.
Bursary increases alone would not be able to attract enough trainees to provide 6,500 additional teachers unless levels were raised above starting salaries. ECRPs and broader retention payments could be used, but increasing the value of targeted bursaries and ECRPs could create large disparities in pay between subjects.
The report recommends the Department for Education should publish a comprehensive strategy for how it defines and plans to meet the target, and how it will be funded.
Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the NFER, and co-author of the report, said: “Our analysis shows that substantially increasing teachers’ pay could possibly deliver the required number of teachers, but it comes at a very high cost that is unlikely to be feasible in the current fiscal environment.
“We wait with interest to get clarity … on how the target will be defined and how it plans to deliver and fund it.”
Jenni French, head of STEM in schools at Gatsby Charitable Foundation, said: “We welcome ambitious policy commitments on teacher recruitment from the new government, and this opportunity to overlay the insights from NFER’s modelling, as part of Gatsby’s ongoing research into teacher retention and recruitment, so that the government has as much information as possible to ensure that its targets are achievable.”
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