Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to promote (a) recruitment and (b) retention of staff in further education colleges.

The department continues to support the further education (FE) sector with the recruitment, retention, and development of teachers through a package of support in the 2022/23 academic year. This includes a new national FE recruitment campaign and teach in FE service to support prospective FE teachers into jobs. This is expected to reach millions of prospective FE teaching staff, and target those with valuable experience and skills in industry to train the next generation of technical experts. Our Taking Teaching Further programme is supporting industry experts to move into FE teaching, and the department is providing bursaries worth up to £26,000, each tax-free, which are available to support FE teacher training in priority subject areas for 2022/23. We are also investing in the quality of existing FE teachers through the T Level Professional Development programme, which has supported over 15,000 staff to deliver the new T Level qualifications.