There has been a significant rise in vacancies for nursery, primary and secondary school staff in the Recruitment and Employment Confederation’s latest Report on Jobs.
The REC said there had been a double-digit rise in vacancies for teaching staff in the past few weeks, with almost 40,000 open roles. In secondary education alone, teaching vacancies went up by 12.6%.
Chief executive Neil Carberry said this showed the scale of the issues with pay, workload and conditions of service among teachers. “Schools are increasingly struggling to hire as the impact of several years of below-target initial recruitment plays out,” he said.
Teaching unions have recently held a series of strikes against pay and conditions in their sector, with failure to meet recruitment targets and attract new teachers into the profession among their key concerns. The National Education Union has advised members to reject the latest pay offer from the government.
A report by the National Foundation for Education Research last week found that teaching vacancies in the UK were almost double what they were before the pandemic. Staff turnover in the year to February 2023 was 93% higher than at the same point in 2019, it revealed.
Teacher recruitment
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders union, described it as “a desperately sad state of affairs”.
“Teacher shortages are a long-term problem that has only worsened since the pandemic. As many other professions are able to offer greater flexibility, including hybrid working, other aspects such as pay and conditions become increasingly important,” he said.
“So when faced with real-terms pay cuts, unsustainable workload pressures and a punitive accountability system it should not come as a surprise that graduates and experienced professionals alike are turning away from teaching.
“The education system cannot function properly if it does not have enough teachers. This should be obvious to everyone but the government has done nowhere near enough to address the cause of the shortages and their recent pay offer suggests they still haven’t grasped the scale of the issue.”
A Freedom of Information request sent to UCAS by recruitment firm Engage Education found that, while the number of female applicants to teaching courses in the UK had increased by 25%, applicants from the EU were the lowest on record at fewer than 1,000. Students applying to study teaching from outside the EU went up 131% in the past three years, however.
Joseph Raffell, head of education at Engage Education, said attracting more international candidates could support schools to tackle the teacher shortage.
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“The demand for teachers is at an all-time high post-Brexit,” he said. “Schools have always utilised candidates from areas such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland most significantly. However, new visa rules mean that it is a lot easier for schools to find top teachers from areas such as South America, Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. We have seen significant success over the past few years with this approach.”
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