Furthermore, six out of every 10 posts are proving “a struggle” to fill with school leaders blaming the problems on the number of teachers who are leaving the profession.
In annual recruitment research carried out by the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), school leaders have reported a problem recruiting across all roles – from teachers to senior leaders.
The NAHT says that the recruitment crisis has now been on-going for three years and it is once again calling for government action.
The latest findings, based on the recruitment experiences of more than 1,000 headteachers between September 2015 and 2016, show that 79 per cent of all vacant posts were classified as “difficult” to fill – with almost two in 10 (17 per cent) going unfilled and six in 10 (62 per cent) proving “a struggle” to fill.
In particular, the survey shows that recruitment difficulties for middle leadership roles such as SEN positions, heads of department, subject or key stage are “pronounced”.
Specifically for leadership roles, the survey found that schools struggled to recruit headteachers in 69 per cent of cases and deputy headteachers in 59 per cent of cases.
Russell Hobby, NAHT general secretary, said: “After three years of warnings, the government is still falling short of its core responsibility to guarantee enough teachers of a high enough standard to meet the needs of our growing school population.”
More than 40 per cent of the respondents in the survey blamed poor teacher retention for the problems and Mr Hobby pointed to recent figures from the Department for Education showing that almost a third of the new teachers who started jobs in English state schools in 2010 had left the sector five years later.
He added: “It shows just how much damage is being done to the teaching profession. Faced with long working hours, unmanageable workloads, weak training and low salaries, the profession is failing to keep talented staff. The government must make the changes necessary to ensure a workforce that can deliver the best education for all. This should be the focus of all our attention, not the distraction of new structures. It’s not rocket science: pay people properly and treat them well.”
Among the school leaders’ comments in the report, Robert Campbell, executive principal of Impington Village College in Cambridge, said recruitment was more challenging now than it has been for years.
He told researchers: “Schools are increasingly finding it a greater challenge to recruit, particularly in the most demanding subjects to fill posts, like maths and science and in languages where there is an acknowledged shortage of graduates.
“We all want the best teaching for our students, but securing this through recruitment is the hardest it has been for years and years.”
Elsewhere in the report, 16 per cent of the school leaders said that their tight budgets were responsible for their failure to recruit because they could not pay the salaries required to attract and retain teachers. Reacting to this, Mr Hobby called for the government to listen to the recommendation from the School Teachers’ Review Body earlier this year that a “significantly higher” pay increase than one per cent would be needed to tackle the recruitment problems.