Forget the White paper: the crisis is now

There must be a lot of nervous secondary school headteachers at the start of this Easter break. Over the past two weeks TeachVac has recorded 7,800 new vacancies for teachers. These vacancies have been posted by schools across England, but especially by schools in the South East Region. Nationally, the total is a record for any two-week period during the past eight years that TeachVac has been collecting data on vacancies from state and private schools across England.

I can confidently predict that not all these vacancies will be filled, and that some will be filled by teachers with ‘less than ideal’ subject knowledge. So bad is the situation nationally that one major international recruitment agency is offering a rereferral bonus of £250, presumably to attract new teachers to its books to help fill vacancies. With the size of TeachVac’s list of candidates that are matched each day with vacancies that puts an interesting valuation on the company.

Seriously though, TeachVac has an index that compares recorded vacancies with the reported number of trainees from the DfE’s census. This system has used a consistent methodology for eight years and is now also showing signs of how much stress the system is under. Not for twenty years, during what was the severe recruitment challenge around the millennium, have secondary schools, especially in parts of the south of England, but not exclusively in that area of the country, faced recruitment challenges on the present scale.

As readers of previous posts will know, the intake into training for September 2022 isn’t looking healthy either at present as was confirmed in the chat during the recent APPG webinar on the White Paper.

With fewer partners of EU citizens probably coming to work here as teachers while their partners used to work elsewhere in the economy, and the international school scene not yet affected by the geo-politics of the moment, it is probably correct to talk of an emerging crisis now reaching most parts of the curriculum outside of schools recruiting primary school teachers and physical education, history and art teachers in secondary schools.

The predictions about any crisis and its depth compared to previous years will be confirmed if there are a large number of re-advertisements in early May, especially if they come with added incentives such as TLRs and Recruitment and Retention bonuses as schools seek to ensure timetables are fully staffed for September 2022.

One casualty of the present situation may well be the levelling up agenda in a market-based labour market. All else being equal, where would a teacher choose to work, a school that is challenging or one that is less demanding?  Last spring, I wrote a blog about the challenges schools in the West Midlands with high levels of free school meals faced in recruiting teachers when compared with other schools in the same area. TeachVac is again collecting this data for schools across England.  However, with this level of vacancies we won’t have the funds to analyse the data this year.

Do graduates want to become teachers?

TeachVac monitors published data on the level of applications to train as a teacher. This monitoring is in addition to its teacher job matching system at www.teachvac.co.uk.

Each month there is a post on this blog about ‘offers’ to would-be trainees and how numbers compare with the previous year. In 2020, there was a covid bounce in applications, as teaching looked like a safe career if the labour market was about to implode. Thanks to the furlough scheme and changes in working practices, graduate unemployment didn’t take off. As a result, 2021 was a more challenging year for teacher training than was 2020, and, from the ‘offers’ perspective, 2022 looks to be no better and potentially even worse in some subjects than 2021.

Another method of measuring the health of the trainee teacher market is to look at how quickly courses fill up with trainees. The DfE site that has replaced UCAS this year has the number of courses with vacancies by subject and sector and the total number of courses listed. It is, therefore, relatively easy to calculate the percentage of courses that no longer have vacancies. Now there may be reasons other than that the course is full for why the ‘no vacancies’ sign has been raised, but as a quick and crude measure it works. The number of courses can also vary from month to month, as providers either devise new routes or withdraw others.

Anyway, with those provisos, what is the state of play at the end of the first week of April 2022? Not good, is probably the best that can be said of the current situation. Overall, there has been little change in the percentage of course with no vacancies since a month ago, especially in the main subjects. The good news is that 58% of psychology ITE courses don’t have vacancies; the bad news is that 93% of physics courses do have vacancies. This is only 2% less than the figure at the start of March. Apart from in physical education, where only two thirds of courses still have vacancies, and that seems a high percentage for this time of year, most secondary subjects still have around four out of five courses showing vacancies.

Perhaps even more worrying is the fact that 84% of courses for intending primary school teachers still have vacancies. In part, this might be due to the plethora of such course on offer from multiple providers. However, in the past it would be expected that most courses would be full before April.

Of course, one drawback with this analysis is that it isn’t apparent as to whether courses have either just one vacancy that has been kept for a really well-qualified applicant or many vacancies. Such information would no doubt be useful to applicants.

The next two months are likely to see few final year students applying for courses as they focus on the completion of their degree courses, and the majority of applicants will come from career switchers or older graduates that have taken time out of the labour market.

New graduates remain a vital source of trainees, and it is to be hoped that after the degree results are announced there will be an uptake of interest in teaching as a career from that group. If not, this could be a really challenging year for providers: 2023 would then be a difficult labour market for schools.

Distribution of physics trainees

The DfE’s ITT Census for 2021/22 was published yesterday – see previous post for the headline data. Over time, it will be possible to mine a great deal of information form the open-source information now provided by the DfE.

Those schools signed up to the new TeachVac service Are you overpaying to advertise your teaching posts? | John Howson (wordpress.com) for a registration fee of £100 plus VAT and  maximum annual charge of £1,000 plus VAT will be able to ask TeachVac staff to match this data with regional data for their area to help predict possible local labour shortages during 2022. So, if you are a school governor, headteacher or work for a MAT or diocese do read what is on offer and go to Teaching Jobs School Vacancies – The National Vacancy Service for Teachers and Schools (teachvac.co.uk) and hit the red tab at the top labelled New Matching Service

Taking physics as an example, the DfE data shows that the 537 trainees in the census are spread unevenly across the country.

Government Region	HEI	SCITT	Grand Total
East Midlands	29	21	50
East of England	16	15	31
London	57	77	134
North East	12	6	18
North West	58	16	74
South East	66	45	111
South West	37	10	47
West Midlands	34	13	47
Yorkshire and The Humber	33	22	55
Grand Total	342	225	567
Source TeachVac from DfE ITT census 2021

Distribution of physics trainees

Approximately 43% of trainees are located in London or the South East, with just eight per cent located with providers in the West Midlands. This can be important because London and the South East contain a significant proportion of the country’s independent secondary schools. Such schools are more likely to advertise for a teacher of physics than do most state schools.

Many of the remaining selective schools are also in London and the South East, and they are the state schools most likely to advertise for a teacher of physics rather than a teacher of science. If just a quarter of the trainees in London and the South East opt to teach outside the state sector, this reduced the pool national to little over 500 trainees many of whom will be on school-based courses and not looking for a job on the open market.

A slightly different picture emerges for design and technology

Row Labels	HEI	SCITT	Grand Total
East Midlands	23	10	33
East of England	13	16	29
London	20	43	63
North East	4	7	11
North West	16	5	21
South East	21	21	42
South West	21	11	32
West Midlands	52	9	61
Yorkshire and The Humber	25	24	49
Grand Total	195	146	341

Distribution of design and technology trainees

Source TeachVac from DfE ITT census 2021

Here the North West looks like an area where recruitment will be a real challenge whereas the West midlands seems relatively, and it is only relatively, better off for teachers of this subject. However, we know nothing about specialisms with the subject.

This type of information is key to sensible recruitment planning and should play an important part in discussions about the working of the leveling up agenda in education at the level of the school.