Great schools are only great if they’ve got great teachers. You might have the grandest facilities imaginable and marketing strategies that make prospective members of your school community go weak at the knee, but if you haven’t got teachers of the right quality, or indeed if you haven’t got sufficient teachers to actually make your curriculum plans work, then you’re unlikely to reach the standards you’re aiming for. This simple truism, more than anything, is why school leaders everywhere ought to be seriously worried about the rising teacher shortages within the profession.
I’ve written before, on more than one occasion, about the recruitment and retention crisis in the education sector, and there are some startling stats that probably bear repeating before we really get into the crux of what this particular piece of writing is all about. In this blog, for example, I noted that the facts around teacher retention make for grim reading, with an article in The Guardian stating that “Nearly a third of teachers who qualified in the last decade have since left the profession.” Indeed, according to a Labour analysis of DfE statistics, of just under 270,000 teachers who qualified in England between 2011 and 2020, more than 81,000 have since left the profession, or three in ten of the total. More recently, 13% of teachers in England who have qualified since the last general election in December 2019 quit in the subsequent two years, about 3,000 in total. It’s also worth noting that one consequence of this high dropout rate is that the average age of teachers in England is much lower than in comparable countries. Startlingly, just 18% of UK teachers currently are over 50. Clearly, a view of teaching as a lifelong commitment has become a rarity in the UK (and even rarer among men: at the last count, 75.5% of teachers in England were female). Later in the same blog, having moved onto the topic of teacher salaries, I wrote that in real terms, the pay of education professionals has fallen sharply since 2009 (by 9.7% in secondary and 11.8% in primary and early years), as capital and other budgets have also shrunk. In addition, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, senior teachers in England have in effect had their pay cut by £6,600 since 2010. The independent economics research institute calculated that long-serving and senior teachers – accounting for nearly a third of those working in England – would have earned the equivalent of £50,300 in 2010. But below-inflation wage increases over the past 12 years has meant their pay in 2022 was just £43,700.
In another blog, written over two years ago now, I noted how the DfE were seeking to address recruitment and retention concerns in UK schools (they’d published this handy guide in January 2018) by focusing upon teacher workload in schools. The education secretary at the time, Damien Hinds, I wrote, announced to a packed conference hall full of head teachers that workload was the reason why all of their teachers were quitting and that he was going to be the one to sort out this awful issue once and for all. Then, sans any irony at all, his team produced a lengthy tome about workload which all school leaders were expected to read, memorise and act upon over the next half-term break so that everyone could then achieve work/life balance nirvana immediately. “With rising pupil numbers”, Mr. Hinds opined, “I recognise that recruitment and retention is difficult for schools. And, clearly, one of the biggest threats to retention, and also to recruitment, is workload. Too many of our teachers and our school leaders are working too long hours – and on non-teaching tasks that are not helping children to learn.”
Last year, during the 2022/2023 academic year, I felt that it was easier than ever before to notice the impact of the recruitment and retention crisis that is currently upon us. Whereas previously during our recruitment windows the school I currently serve would receive a healthy number of applications for each position advertised, for which we could then assemble a strong field for interview, we were often only able to move forward with one or two applications once our normal filtering processes had been applied. What was once a gushing river had become a shallow stream. We ended up, eventually, with some wonderful teachers in position, but only because we worked really hard to get the ones we wanted and we actively pursued certain individuals. Things, as noted also in this recent article, have clearly changed.
More recently, at the start of this academic year, the teacher recruitment agency Teach Away published a hugely helpful report on the aforementioned recruitment and retention crisis, which I would urge school leaders everywhere to read and which is available here. Over the next few paragraphs, I’m going to try to summarise some of the key takeaways from this report. Firstly, it begins by noting that “While the educational landscape in 2021 was characterised by frequent pivots, 2022 brought larger more foundational shifts to the industry.” Schools, the authors write, have “faced mounting stress on educators and increased teacher shortages.” Ok, so far, so clear, and also just a little bit scary, especially when they go on to note that “The strain of teacher shortages can place additional stress on teachers, potentially leading to a cycle of shortages as some teachers may decide to leave the profession or become unable to keep up with the demands of their roles.” This, to clarify, is a really key point: when schools don’t have the right number of teachers in the building and when either capacity or an ability to put subject or phase specialists in classrooms becomes an issue, then workload or wellbeing concerns can drive those who remained out of the door. Take note, school leaders everywhere, but as if this message wasn’t quite chilling enough, the report goes on the state the following: “The impending teacher shortage is the most critical education issue we will face in the next decade.” But, all is not lost, because “The better we understand teacher depletion, the better we can create robust solutions that will positively impact students and teachers alike.”
So that we’re all clear what our robust solutions are, the Teach Away report’s authors then start to hit us with some key stats. To begin with, it is noted that “52% of teaching candidates reported that unprofessional and disrespectful communication from recruitment staff led to a negative experience during the hiring process.” So, to be blunt, you had better make sure that whoever is your first point of contact behind the scenes (typically, this is some form of executive assistant from the HR team) is super clear and polite in their communication, highly organised and really, really good with people. What you don’t want, clearly, is to have someone in post who actually puts people off because they’re either rude, don’t appear to know what they’re doing or are reflecting your organisation in a poor light for some other reason. Obvious, perhaps, but just look at that stat above again if you think that there’s no chance at all of this happening where you currently work.
Moving forward, the report digs a little deeper into why teachers switch schools by noting that “Salary and benefits is the top reason (64%) why teachers are willing to step away from their positions, but teachers also want more career progression opportunities (55%), better work/life balance (51%) and more CPD opportunities (51%).” Similarly, the following is definitely worth copying down and underlining a few times: “Many teachers currently abroad are more interested in renewing their contracts (38%) than not (27%). However, 36% of teachers are not sure … and 60% of teachers are searching for a new teaching position even if they are happy in their current role.” In case you weren’t paying attention at the back for that bit, over half of your teachers in your school are always looking for new opportunities, even if they’re in the middle of a contract. In a context of teacher depletion where there are probably more positions than there are professionals to fill them, this means that school leaders need to do everything they can to convince colleagues that staying where they currently are is a much better option for them than leaving and going somewhere else. The 38% stat above would indicate that most would prefer stability, but you’d better make sure you’re keeping that figure more or less where it is by ensuring that daily experiences in your school are giving your teachers something better than what they could possibly get in other settings.
On the subject of daily experiences, the report also notes that “Safe, healthy and sustainable working conditions were the most important factors for candidates when considering joining a new school, with 32% of respondents ranking it as their top priority.” As all leaders surely already know, the culture which you cultivate deliberately in your school goes a long way to determining its success, or not, as the case may be. If teachers feel trusted and valued as professionals, and they go home most days feeling like they’ve worked hard (but not to a point of exhaustion) and that they’ve been able to make a difference, then the culture in place is likely to be positive. You don’t get this by accident, of course, and reaching a positive point needs to be a priority in every school; settings where this isn’t prioritised tend, in my experience, to be the kind of places where turnover is high and where it’s tough to bring new people in. Work actively towards wellbeing rather than burnout, basically. The Teach Away report kind of also acknowledges this: “A school’s culture is an important factor in a teacher’s overall commitment and satisfaction in their job. 46% of respondents cited community and relationships as the main reason why they intend to renew their contract at their current school.”
So, other than getting the culture right so that not everyone wants to leave, what to do about recruitment from this point forward given that the landscape has changed so dramatically? Firstly, in my opinion, you’ve just got to think a little bit differently to how you maybe did previously. The days of simply putting an ad on TES and waiting for the deluge of high-quality candidates to follow are gone, clearly. You may still end up with someone who is right for your setting, but it won’t be as easy as it once was as that professional may well have a number of offers from other schools at the same time. So, you need to seek to connect with your potential new colleagues, and if you really want them to join your team then you need to actively pursue them and make them feel wanted.
Teacher recruitment is fast becoming a buyer’s market. Even the Teach Away report notes near its conclusion that “The current education job market is candidate-driven, with teachers holding significant power in the hiring process.” It’s also important to note that we are in the midst of a period which has been previously termed as The Great Resignation (which I have written about previously here), and which is essentially a societal shift as a result of a number of factors, all of which have moved power away from bosses and into the hands of their employees. Although some controversial and divisive views no doubt exist around this perspective, we would all surely acknowledge the reality that things have changed somewhat, and that it would be wise to those involved in recruitment everywhere to think a little bit differently as a result.
Longer-term, who knows where this recruitment and retention crisis could take us? It’s perhaps not entirely outlandish to speculate that we could end up with significantly lower entry requirements for ITT, for school leaders to reduce curriculum offers due to a dearth of subject specialists, for the retirement age to disappear entirely and for some settings to even need to consider periods of the week during which students are required to study online – even from home because there just aren’t enough professionals to go around in the building anymore. Drastic measures, perhaps, but what else can you do if there just aren’t enough teachers for your school anymore?
Let’s try to bring this all together in simple terms, without going over all the stats and reports again. Great schools need great teachers, but they also need to make sure that they’ve got enough teachers, and in an era of teacher depletion this is increasingly difficult to achieve. Because recruitment has become challenging, it’s more important than ever to get retention right, so leaders need to work on the culture in their settings as a priority. Things have changed externally, so you may need to update your internal processes in order to address this, as well as thinking differently about recruitment yourself.
Steven Miles 001 
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