This report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, surveyed senior leaders in primary and secondary schools with responsibility for staffing about their experience of teacher recruitment, retention, and what actions, if any, they had taken to manage shortages.
Schools reported that, alongside budget pressures, insufficient quantity and quality of available applicants for teacher vacancies was a key recruitment challenge. Only 13 per cent of primary school leaders and 27 percent of secondary school leaders reported that they could have afforded to recruit another teacher.
The schools that found it most difficult to recruit teachers reported that their key recruitment challenges, were being unable to assemble a field of quality applicants and experiencing issues with the suitability/ quality of staff applying.
The number of entrants to ITT in 2022 is expected to be well below the level of 2019 and retention levels are returning to pre-pandemic levels – therefore suggests that secondary schools are likely to struggle with filling vacancies in the coming years.
Schools finding teacher recruitment challenging is also associated with important negative implications for school operations, and therefore likely to be detrimental to pupils’ education and learning.