Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the total number of (a) full-time teachers required for schools in England to all be fully staffed; and (b) full-time equivalent permanent teachers currently teaching in schools in England.
There are 451,870 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers in service in state funded schools in England as of November 2017. Schools will always have some vacancies, temporarily filled vacancies or staff absences. They use occasional and other supply teachers to meet these demands. These teachers may not be fully reflected within FTE figures as these include only teachers who have a contract of over 28 days duration or, in the case of occasional teachers, are employed by the school on the day data is collected.
The Department collects details of teachers working in state funded schools through the annual School Workforce Census. The census does identify those teachers who are employed via a service agreement with an agency but not whether they are a supply teacher.
The following table provides the numbers and proportions of FTE teachers by their contract agreement type and the headcount number of occasional teachers in state funded schools in England for November 2013 to 2017:
| 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 |
CONTRACT TYPE[1] |
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Permanent | 404,124 | 407,397 | 409,801 | 411,943 | 409,878 |
Fixed term | 24,529 | 25,978 | 26,000 | 25,320 | 24,133 |
Temporary | 17,867 | 17,616 | 17,116 | 16,091 | 14,635 |
Service Agreement with an Agency | 2,465 | 3,226 | 3,286 | 3,194 | 2,751 |
Service Agreement with Local Authority | 335 | 343 | 245 | 254 | 161 |
Service Agreement with Other Source | 338 | 394 | 413 | 431 | 291 |
Unknown | 5 | 16 | 4 | 4 | 21 |
Total | 449,663 | 454,969 | 456,865 | 457,236 | 451,870 |
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Head count of occasional teachers[2] | 13,484 | 14,105 | 13,064 | 12,783 | 11,757 |
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PERCENTAGE |
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Permanent | 89.9 | 89.5 | 89.7 | 90.1 | 90.7 |
Fixed term | 5.5 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.5 | 5.3 |
Temporary | 4.0 | 3.9 | 3.7 | 3.5 | 3.2 |
Service Agreement with an Agency | 0.5 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.6 |
Service Agreement with a Local Authority | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.0 |
Service Agreement with another Source | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 |
Unknown | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
Total | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
Source: School Workforce Census
The Department uses the Teacher Supply Model to estimate national postgraduate Initial Teacher Training place requirements for primary and each secondary subject and as part of this, estimates the longer term future demand for teachers in English state-funded schools. The most recently published model is available at the following web link: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tsm-and-initial-teacher-training-allocations-2019-to-2020
[1] Teachers are recorded for those who have a contract of a least 28 days duration who are in service on the date of the census in November each year.
[2] Occasional teachers are a headcount of teachers with a contract of less than 28 days who were in school on the census day in November.