This NFER report warns that there is a substantial risk that teacher recruitment targets will not be met this year across a large range of secondary subjects, including English, a subject that usually meets its target. It also worryingly shows that there are recruitment challenges in other subjects that tend to recruit well, including geography, biology, art and religious education.
The report projects that there will be a recruitment shortfall in persistent shortage subjects, such as physics, which is estimated to be recruiting at less than 20% of the level required to meet its target. It also reveals that subjects including maths, chemistry, computing, design and technology and modern foreign languages, will continue to have recruitment challenges this year.
The latest cohort of initial teacher training applicants will not start teaching in schools until September 2023, giving the Government and schools a window of time to plan and take action. Without action to address teacher recruitment and retention, shortages may increasingly come to negatively impact on pupils’ education and learning.
This report assesses the state of teacher supply and aims to monitor the progress the school system in England is making towards meeting the teacher supply challenge by measuring the key indicators and trends of teacher supply and working conditions. The analysis assesses the state of teacher supply as the pandemic’s immediate impacts decline, as well as outlining the impacts of the pandemic on teachers’ working lives.
The research also finds that teacher retention rates, which had improved substantially in 2020 during the pandemic, due to economic uncertainty and lockdown, also appeared to be returning towards pre-pandemic levels in 2021, due to the returning wider labour market opportunities.