Teacher recruitment and retention has been high-profile in the media recently, where it has been very clear that school leaders are genuinely concerned about how we can keep those already in the profession engaged and committed to their careers and where the next generation teachers will come from.
This summer, I managed to end the academic year with a fully staffed school, but I genuinely count myself as one of the lucky ones. I have several headteacher colleagues who were not able to recruit or got “gazumped” when a teacher they had appointed didn’t turn up on September 1 because they had a better offer. Outrageous!
It is becoming a “buyer’s market” if you are a teacher of a shortage subject and you are good at your job. You are in high demand and schools will pay you well.
It is incredibly hard to recruit into shortage subjects such as physics, chemistry, maths and foreign languages and increasingly challenging to fill vacancies in geography now too. It is also proving very difficult to retain teachers and I have definitely noticed a difference in the past five years regarding the number of teachers who are leaving the profession.
As a reasonably new headteacher I don’t have decades of experience to compare this current situation to, however I can certainly see the impact of huge educational reform, increased rigour and higher levels of accountability on the teaching profession.
Ever since I became involved in staff recruitment in schools I have followed the mantra “you live and die by your appointments”. Recruiting the right people with the right attitudes towards work and education is a fundamental part of becoming a high-performing school.
Consequently I have always treated recruitment very seriously and since becoming a head I have ensured I take a leading role in the appointment of staff. However, it is incredibly frustrating when you invest a significant amount of time, effort and money into a recruitment process only to find there is a very weak or limited field of applicants.
Are teachers now less prepared to move schools? Has there been so much reform to our systems in education that people are happier sticking with what they know rather than moving to a new school and potentially into the unknown?
I know other heads who have experienced similar frustrations in recent years and it is not uncommon for secondary schools to receive no applications worthy of interview for vacancies in shortage subjects.
With the compulsory EBacc on the horizon I have significant concerns about where all these additional teachers are going to appear from. Will an additional 2,000 languages teachers just magically appear to solve all our problems? And in a subject such as geography, a perennially popular subject, will we be able to meet student demand?
What this has all led to is a significant amount of disparity between teachers in secondary education, depending on the subject you teach. Schools now commonly pay shortage subject teachers recruitment and retention allowances to incentivise an employment offer and this has also been a recruitment strategy for some time for encouraging graduates to pursue careers in teaching. But where does this stop?
Are we more likely to enter a capability process with an underperforming teacher of a subject that is easier to recruit to, such as PE, compared to a shortage area such as maths? Are we more likely to take a supportive and developmental approach to the teacher of maths because we are concerned about the quality of what else there is out there if we needed to recruit?
There are some serious ethical questions here that school leaders need to consider, and while I think it might be naïve to think that we could achieve true equity across our staffing and employment structures, the teacher shortage is unquestionably creating some issues that need significant reflection.
It would be refreshing to see our new prime minister recognise that we have a genuine problem and invest some time and effort into this, rather than pushing through reforms to reintroduce a selective school system, which will further disenfranchise and marginalise large sections of the profession.
- SecEd’s headteacher diarist is in his third year of headship at a comprehensive school in the Midlands.