Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 21 December 2022 to Question 110853 on Religion: Secondary Education, if she will make an estimate of the number and proportion of teachers of (a) religious education, (b) geography, (c) history and (d) English who spent the majority of their timetabled hours teaching each subject in the last 12 months.

Information on the school workforce in England, including subjects taught in state funded secondary schools, is collected as part of the annual School Workforce Census each November. Information is published in the ‘School Workforce in England’ statistical publication, available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.

As of November 2021, 49% of teachers teaching religious education (RE), 72% teaching geography, 73% teaching history, and 87% teaching English were teaching these subjects for at least 50% of the time in a typical week of the school timetable. The following table breaks this information down further.

Teachers in secondary schools in England who spent the majority¹ of their timetabled hours teaching RE, geography, history or English

November 2021

Source: School Workforce Census and Database of Teacher Records

1 - 50% or more of individual teachers’ total timetabled hours.

2 - Teachers with at least some of their timetabled time set to teach the subject.

Timetabled teaching is reported for a typical week in November, as determined by the school. It does not cover an entire year of teaching. If there are variations in timetabling across the year, this is not covered in the data available to the Department. As this information is based on electronic timetabling data, it does not include time spent by teachers on their classroom preparation, training, or any other non-timetabled activities.

Data on subjects taught is collected from a large sample of secondary schools. This is then weighted to provide national totals.