Teacher recruitment will be stepped up under a future Labour government, leader Keir Starmer has stated.
Setting out six pledges in a speech today, which he said were “fully costed” and would be delivered within two terms of a Labour government, Starmer said Labour would recruit an extra 6,500 teachers.
This was welcomed by unions. Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “An incoming government will inherit an urgent and escalating teacher recruitment and retention crisis. This matters for every child and family.
“Over the past 14 years a combination of national decisions has resulted in insufficient graduates choosing teaching as a profession and teachers leaving in droves.”
He added: “6,500 additional teachers would be a welcome commitment, are desperately needed and would contribute to better life chances. This would need to be hand in hand with restoring the value of teachers’ pay and attractive pay levels across the stages in a teaching career and a different approach on education policy.”
Labour’s pledge will be paid for by ending tax breaks for private schools, Starmer said.
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National Foundation for Educational Research school workforce lead, Jack Worth, said his organisation supported the Labour party “making teacher supply a key policy priority, as solving this key challenge would provide the education sector with the capacity it needs to deliver a high-quality education for children and young people. As well as taking ‘first-steps’, a long-term strategy will be needed to improve the attractiveness of teaching, with a range of ambitious and cost effective measures to improve both recruitment and retention.”
School leaders’ union NAHT general secretary Paul Whiteman said: “To recruit an extra 6,500 teachers, any future government will need to make teaching a competitive career in the graduate marketplace again, by undoing over a decade of real terms pay cuts, reducing workload, and resetting the brutal Ofsted inspection regime, removing single word judgments.”
There were no renewed commitments on workers’ rights among the pledges, but none were expected given that Labour and the unions earlier this week came to an agreement over amendments to the plans.
Starmer’s speech echoed that of Tony Blair in 1997, who made five pledges also including cutting NHS waiting times, improving education and cracking down on antisocial behaviour. A party spokesperson pointed out that the national minimum wage was not among pledges, yet was successfully introduced in 1999. Similarly, he said, the absence of new policies on workers’ rights from the pledges did not imply they were of reduced importance to the Labour leadership.
Among those endorsing Labour’s plans was Seb James, chief executive of Boots. In a pre-recorded statement aired at the pledges event, held in Thurrock, Essex, James said that among the reasons he was backing Labour was its employment policy. He said it was important to have “a government that works with business to help get people up and down the country in some of the most deprived areas of our great nation, into work, and keep them in work. That ranges from having apprenticeship schemes properly helping business to re-skilling mature workers.”
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He added that Starmer had specifically mentioned measures to revitalise high streets. This was vital, James said, because high streets were not only places people come to shop, “it’s a place of work – in some small towns, the only place of work”.
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