An analysis (Worth & Tang, 2024) finds that ministers will need to use pay incentives alongside other strategies including training bursaries, retention payments, and workload reduction to meet its target.
The report, published by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) says that if the Department for Education (DfE) uses pay alone, then salaries would need to increase by 9.55% a year for the next two years in order to attract this many new teachers.
During the election campaign, the Labour Party pledged to recruit 6,500 new teachers “in key subjects”. But little detail has been forthcoming about how it defines this 6,500 target and how it intends to meet it.
However, education secretary Bridget Phillipson has confirmed that she is aiming to reach this goal by the end of the current Parliament.
In order to undertake its analysis, the NFER’s report defines the 6,500 target as an increase in the number of secondary teachers by 6,500 (excluding history and PE) and meeting the primary recruitment target as normal in 2027/28.
It says that this recruitment target is “ambitious and not trivial” and is unlikely to be met without “new policy action”.
The report states: “Many of the policy measures we explore would not be sufficient to meet the supply target in isolation, unless they were taken to unrealistic extremes.”
The report provides analysis of some of the potential policy choices available to the government – with estimated costs.
If ministers decided to use pay alone then the required pay rises of 9.55% per-year would cost an additional £2.1bn in 2025/26, rising to £4.9bn in 2026/27. Other lower cost options include:
- Increasing the value or number of bursaries aimed at shortage subjects.
- Expanding the system of early career retention payments (ECRPs).
- Retention payments for more experienced teachers in shortage subjects.
- Non-financial measures such as workload reduction and improved CPD.
For example, using bursary increases alone could attract an additional 2,500 teachers by 2027/28 at a cost of £600m. This would involve increasing bursary values to just below starting salary in all subjects exept history and PE. However, a number of shortage subjects already have busaries at this level meaning this policy lever would lead to additional teachers only in subjects such as English, art and design, RE, biology, and languages.
When it comes to ECRPs, the analysis finds that increasing these payments from £6,000 to £15,000 per-year for all eligible subjects (currently chemistry, computing, maths, physics) across a teacher’s first five years would lead to 2,600 additional teachers in these subjects by 2027/28. This would cost £300m a year.
A second scenario where £6,000 ECRPs are given to all subjects eligible for bursaries would lead to an additional 1,668 teachers by 2027/28.
The report also considers broader retention payments for more experienced teachers. In this scenario we would see ECRPs of between £6,000 and £12,000 but then with experienced teachers in eligible subjects also getting retention payments of £3,000 to £8,000. This would cost £1.3bn a year but would lead to the 6,500 target being met.
However, the report warns: “Pursuing these options that are lower in financial cost are not without risks for policy-makers. Increasing the value of targeted bursaries and ECRPs would increase disparities in remuneration between subjects and could introduce material distortions in teachers’ path of overall remuneration.”
The study also looks at whether non-financial policy levers could potentially impact the recruitment target. It says that evidence suggests reducing teachers’ working hours by five hours per week – the target of the Workload Reduction Taskforce – would not be sufficient on its own to improve retention enough to meet the target. Likewise, reintroducing funded national CPD programmes would not be enough to meet the target on its own.
The report recommends that the DfE publishes a “comprehensive strategy for how it defines and plans to meet the 6,500-teacher supply target, with sufficient funding to deliver it”.
Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the NFER and co-author of the report, said he was “waiting with interest” to see more details of how the government proposes to meet its pledge: “The government faces a considerable challenge to meet its 6,500 teacher supply pledge and many choices about how to deliver it.
“Our analysis shows that substantially increasing teachers’ pay could possibly deliver the required number of teachers, but it comes at a very high cost that is unlikely to be feasible in the current fiscal environment.
“Achieving the supply target will require new policy measures. We wait with interest to get clarity from the government on how the target will be defined and how it plans to deliver and fund it.”
Commenting on the report, Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that even if 6,500 new teachers are recruited/retained, it is “unlikely to be sufficient to address the level of shortages which schools and colleges are currently experiencing”.
He added: “Improved pay and conditions across the profession are the absolute prerequisites for any strategy. It is vital to ensure that salaries are competitive enough to attract recruits and then retain them.
“The new government has taken a step in the right direction with this year’s school teachers’ pay award but this will need to be followed up by further improvements in future years.
“And it is extremely regrettable that it has failed to fund pay increases for teachers in colleges where there are also significant shortages and which are vital to the government’s aim of boosting skills. We call upon the Treasury to remedy this inequity as a matter of urgency.”
- Worth & Tang: How to recruit 6,500 teachers? Modelling the potential routes to delivering Labour’s teacher supply pledge, NFER, 2024: www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/how-to-recruit-6-500-teachers-modelling-the-potential-routes-to-delivering-labour-s-teacher-supply-pledge