John Taylor Multi-Academy Trust is a member of the Confederation of School Trusts – an excellent organisation that advocates for the academy sector and highlights developments in schools and wider themes across education. In its latest member briefing, it summarised the newly-published 2025 Teacher Labour Market in England Annual Report by The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). The unwelcome headline in the Report is that teacher vacancy levels are at their highest rates since records began in 2010.
The study shows teacher leaving rates have not improved since before the pandemic and more leavers are of working age rather than retiring. This, coupled with persistently low levels of recruitment into initial teacher training, is leading to widespread teacher shortages, with unfilled vacancies reaching six per thousand teachers in 2023/24 – double the pre-pandemic rate and six times higher than 2010/11.
The report calls for a range of measures to be taken to shore up retention and to incentivise recruitment. As might be anticipated, these measures centre on the fundamental factors of workload and pay: reducing the former and enhancing the latter. This is eminently sensible and, I’m sure, will be impactful if implemented with vigour.
However, there is something about the value of teaching that resides beyond workload “to do” lists and a monthly payroll entry. On the Department for Education’s “Get into Teaching” website, there are a range of case studies and points made that highlight why teaching is such a worthwhile, and worthy, profession to pursue. These include the opportunity to make a difference to young lives, to work creatively and to harness skills and qualifications already gained. However, even on this website, the case for teaching as a professional choice is made below that of pay and benefits:
For a number of years, and in a range of forums, I have argued that we need to consider teaching as an act of national service as is the case in many other countries. We know that during the pandemic, teachers and leaders in our schools were considered to be “key workers” – and rightly so, as they kept our system going for all our children and continued to offer school-based learning to vulnerable children and those of other key workers. Further back in 2000, I recall being in receipt of a letter from my local authority (Wiltshire County Council) during a national haulier protest which entitled me to preferential treatment at the petrol pumps – again as a key worker with an imperative that I get to my place of work in the context of acute fuel shortages. For many young people, a sense of making a profound difference and receiving subsequent recognition is a great incentive when they are considering their career choices.
Aside from times of crisis, do we as a nation assign sufficient prestige to teaching? Certainly, many children, parents and individuals in our communities do so – and a “thank you” card or small gift makes such a difference to the teacher who receives it. Yet we also have a small minority who seek to erode teacher authority, undermine expectations and – sometimes publicly via social media – defame reputation. Such individuals would, no doubt, be the first to criticise their child’s school were it to struggle to recruit high calibre, specialist staff. They are the equivalent of car owners who write to the manufacturer to complain of poor workmanship, having failed to have their vehicle serviced and routinely driven it recklessly and outside its specifications.
We all have a responsibility to preserve what we value. If, as a society and a nation, we value our children’s education we need to preserve the wellbeing of those who deliver it and actively defend them from the few who seek to deride, devalue, and dismiss. Pay and workload are, of course, factors here – as they are in any recruitment and retention dynamic – but as an act of national service, teaching should always mean more.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Mike
You must be logged in to post a comment.