This NFER research analysed thirty years of longitudinal data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) to understand teachers’ labour market and help to inform the setting of teacher pay over the next few years.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, England’s school system was facing a severe challenge of training enough teachers to meet the demand caused by growing secondary pupil numbers and higher teacher attrition rates than earlier in the 2010s. As part of its plans to address this long-term retention and recruitment challenge, the Department for Education (DfE) proposed a series of increases to teacher pay between 2020/21 and 2022/23, which were particularly aimed at improving the retention of early-career teachers.
However, the outlook for the long-term teacher supply challenge was dramatically upended due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. Lockdowns, school closures and the ensuing recession led to a substantial fall in teacher mobility and attrition, and a boost in recruitment to teacher training. This led the Chancellor to announce that teachers’ pay in 2021/22 would not be increasing but frozen at current levels.
This report aims to inform the setting of teacher pay over the next few years when pay decisions are occurring.
The report found that the most common destination is to leave employment, whether to retire (around 10 percent in the first year after leaving) or leave employment at working age (around 55 per cent in the first year).