Headteachers have cautioned that Labour should be prioritized, preventing the “disastrous” stream of teachers from quitting the profession and aiming to hire thousands more.
According to the new government data, nearly as many teachers left the profession in England as they entered it last year. According to the school workforce census, 44,002 entered in the year ending November 2023, while 43,522 left.
Daniel Kedebe, national secretary of the National Education Union, described the “disastrous” results as a shocking indictment of this government’s reading.
One of Labour’s six election promises is to hire 6,500 more teachers, which will be paid by raising taxes on private schools. While teachers praised this promise, Kebede noted that it equated to one new teacher for every four schools, meaning the sector would still be tens of thousands of teachers short of what it needed.
He urged Labour to set up an independent commission on recruitment and retention if they win the election: “When we have the largest class sizes in Europe and are losing many teachers, we urgently need a new direction of travel.”
For many years, schools have been experiencing a chronic lack of maths and scientific teachers, with job postings frequently receiving no qualified candidates. Still, the issue has now spread to formerly buoyant courses such as English. Schools claim that topic specialists are leaving for less stressful or higher-paying jobs and are not being replaced.
Will Teece, headteacher of Brookvale Groby Learning Campus, a secondary school in Leicester, stated, “The Problem is also here. The government has buried its head in the stand for so long that I’m almost too late to fix it.” His school has re-advertised some teaching positions four or five times and still has not found someone to interview.
Teece Urged Labour to focus on how to keep and hire teachers, claiming that they regularly left schools because they had to do so much work that their personal lives suffered. They are looking after other people’s children and not spending any time with their own.”
Jonny Uttley, chief executive of the Education Alliance, which operates 11 schools in Hull and East Yorkshire, stated, “Year after year, the crisis of hiring and retaining teachers has gotten worse.”
He added that Labour might make some adjustments without significant funding commitments. “Simply having a government that wants to talk up the teaching profession after so many years of ministers talking it down would make a huge difference to morale.”
According to research, the most common reason teachers leave is lack of time. Uttley said that changing the accountability framework, in which schools are continuously scared of high-stakes Ofsted inspections and are pitted against one another in the government Progress 8 performance indicators, would be one of the best and cheapest methods to address this issue.
Ministers were accused of marking the recruitment crisis even worse in April by cutting money to a popular and well-praised program that assists older professionals in starting a new career in the classroom. Now Teach, a charity program that manages the Department of Education’s £ 1.7 million career transition project career and has exceeded recruitment targets, told the Observer this weekend that it was hopeful that Labour would resurrect it.
Lucy Kellaway, a journalist-turned-teacher in charge of the program, stated, “ We are turning anyone away. Given the teacher shortage, that would be terrible.”
She described the decision to discontinue the project while it was still in operation as “absolutely mad” and claimed that Labour has made “positive noise.” The charity has been collecting privately to ensure it does not have to turn away the many suitable applicants who are “pushing at our doors.”
