Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the value of using recruitment agencies to recruit teachers.

It is for schools to decide how they recruit their staff but the government wants to help schools do so in the most efficient way possible.

In the manifesto we committed to creating a national teacher vacancy service for schools to publish vacancies, in order to reduce costs and help them find the best teachers. The aim is to reduce both the time schools currently spend on publishing vacancies and the cost of recruiting new teachers. The service will also make it easier for aspiring and current teachers to find jobs quickly and easily.

Dependent on the outcome of our current development phase, we could expect to start building this service in 2018.