This NFER report highlights some of the main opportunities and challenges brought by Covid-19, drawing on applications data from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) and nationally-representative surveys of teachers and senior leaders.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, England’s school system was facing an increasingly severe challenge of recruiting enough trainees to initial teacher training (ITT) to meet growing teacher demand. The pandemic has had a number of impacts on the ITT sector and on teacher supply more broadly.
The increase in accepted offers is higher in regions with more weakened labour markets. The data shows considerable regional variation in the number of accepted offers, with the largest increases in the West Midlands, London and the North West, and smaller increases in the East of England, North East and South West.
Higher education providers have seen the largest increase in accepted offers, slightly higher than for school-centred ITT (SCITT) and unsalaried School Direct routes. In contrast, the number of accepted offers for salaried School Direct routes is considerably lower in August 2020 compared to August 2019. This is likely to be due to schools reducing their recruitment of new teachers: more existing teachers stayed in post and schools had no additional budget to be able to hire new teachers anyway.
Since Covid-19 there has been a reduction in school placements on offer to ITT providers. The UCAS data suggests there are likely to be more trainees in 2020/21 compared to 2019/20, which means more school placements are required for them to complete their training.