A press release from the Department for Education a couple of weeks ago on data from the school workforce census felt like an alternate reality (DfE, 2023).
It giddily proclaimed: “Schools in England now have more teachers than ever before.”
There was the slightest of nods from education secretary Gillian Keegan to acknowledge that all in the garden was not actually rosy. “We know there is more to do,” she said at one point. But, in general, it was a case of: “Crisis? What crisis?”
As a piece of propaganda, it was embarrassing. Even a quick glance at the data, revealed the glaring omission. What the press release did not mention is that there has also been a big increase in students.
As SecEd reported last week, this increase in teachers has come at a time when student numbers across all schools have increased by 73,800 to nearly 9.1 million.
Indeed, the number of teachers has risen by 6% since 2010, but in that period there has been 11% increase in student numbers during this time.
In recognisable reality, rather than the alternate version in the DfE, the government routinely misses targets for recruiting graduates into teacher training courses and the data suggests a worsening picture on teacher retention.
Schools across England are struggling with teacher shortages which are more severe than they have ever been in living memory. Pay erosion, systemic workload pressure, and years of underfunding have devalued teaching and demoralised teachers and leaders.
This is why the Association of School and College Leaders is balloting on industrial action alongside colleagues in other teacher and leadership unions.
Buried deep in the DfE statistics is some data that the government was less keen to shout about because it sums up the impact of this crisis and concerns something the public cares about a lot – class sizes. Here it is.
You’ll see that the average class size in secondary schools has risen from 20.4 students in 2015/16 to 22.4 students in 2022/23. It is no coincidence that during this same period schools have suffered from a lack of sufficient funding and a chronic shortage of teachers. Faced with the hard facts of not having enough money or teachers, there is often no alternative other than to nudge up class sizes.
But the impact is at its starkest when one considers the number of students in large classes, that is classes of 31 or more. In 2015/16, the number of secondary school students in such classes was just over 300,000. Now it is close to 500,000 – a staggering increase of more than 60%.
The problem is not confined to secondary schools. In primary education, when one considers key stage 2 (given that there is a legal cap on key stage 1 class sizes) the number of students in large classes has increased from around 360,000 to nearly 400,000 – an increase of 11%.
In both secondary and key stage 2, the total number of students has risen in that time. But funding and teacher numbers should not be so tight that the system immediately buckles in response to a demographic change. And, in any case, the percentage increase in the number of students in large classes outstrips the increase in the number of students.
The inescapable conclusion is that many schools simply do not have the money or teachers that they need to teach many of their students in what I suspect most parents would consider to be a reasonably sized class.
Every now and then you will see an education expert pop up to challenge the notion that large classes are necessarily a bad thing. However, common sense suggests that it is more difficult to manage large classes, creates more teacher workload, and reduces the capacity for individual support. The inevitable risks are that educational quality may be compromised, and teachers are less likely to stay in the profession.
Parents tend to hate large class sizes. That creates a familiar problem for schools as they can end up taking the flak when the real culprits are sitting in offices in Whitehall insisting that schools have a record number of teachers.
If this makes you feel like Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network – “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore” – make sure you vote in your union’s ballot for industrial action.
As we say in our ballot at ASCL, your vote is your voice – #VoteForEducation.
- Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. Read his previous articles for SecEd, via http://bit.ly/seced-barton
Further information
- DfE: Record number of teachers in England’s schools, 2023: https://bit.ly/3XgaXQi