Teachers

(asked on 11th February 2019) - View Source

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.


Answered by
Nick Gibb Portrait
Nick Gibb
This question was answered on 19th February 2019

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]

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

Head count of occasional teachers[2]

13,484

14,105

13,064

12,783

11,757

PERCENTAGE

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.

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