Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to (a) tackle staff shortages in primary schools and (b) improve recruitment in all areas of schooling after the covid-19 outbreak.

The number of teachers remains high, with over 465,500 full time equivalent (FTE) working in state funded schools across the country. This is over 24,000 more than in 2010.

2021 saw an increase of more than 4,400 in FTE teachers in state funded schools in England. This has resulted in the largest qualified number of teachers since the school workforce census began in the 2010/11 academic year.

One of the Department’s priorities is to ensure that it continues to attract, retain and develop highly skilled teachers. The Department launched its new digital service, ‘Apply for teacher training’ last year, enabling a more streamlined, user-friendly application route, to make it easier for people to become teachers. The Department remains committed to delivering £30,000 starting salaries to attract and retain the best teachers.

The Department is also taking action to enable teachers to succeed through transforming its training and support. The Department will deliver 500,000 teacher training and development opportunities by the end of 2024, giving all teachers and head teachers access to evidence based training and professional development at every stage of their career.

The Department’s reforms are aimed not only at increasing teacher recruitment across all areas, but also at ensuring teachers stay and succeed in the profession. The Department has published a range of resources to help address teacher workload and wellbeing, and support all schools to introduce flexible working practices. These resources include the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter, which the Department is encouraging schools to sign up to as a shared commitment to promote staff wellbeing, and the school workload reduction toolkit, developed alongside head teachers. The Charter is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/education-staff-wellbeing-charter, and the toolkit is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit.

This year, the number of new postgraduate entrants to primary teaching was below target by 7%. Despite this, the Department has seen strong recruitment in primary in recent years, achieving 131% of the postgraduate teacher training target in the 2021/22 academic year, and 125% in the 2020/21 academic year.

The Department recognises there is further to go in key secondary subjects. For those starting initial teacher training in the 2023/24 academic year, the Department is offering bursaries worth up to £27,000 and scholarships worth up to £29,000 to encourage talented trainees to apply to train in key secondary subjects. The Department has increased bursaries and scholarships for trainees in key subjects and has expanded the offer to international trainees in languages and physics.

The Department also offers a Levelling Up Premium worth up to £3,000 annually for mathematics, physics, chemistry and computing teachers in the first five years of their careers who choose to work in disadvantaged schools.