Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps the Government plans to take to reduce the need for schools to pay for the advertising of school staff vacancies; and if he will make a statement.

The Department is developing a free national digital service for schools to publish teacher vacancies and for teachers to search for them. This new service aims to reduce the cost to schools of teacher recruitment, and make it easier for teachers to find new posts.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has estimated that school spend between £65-75 million per year on teacher recruitment advertisements. This is set out on page 12 of this report: https://www.pwc.co.uk/assets/pdf/teacher-recruitment-pwc-education-insight-23may2016.pdf.

Testing will start with a sample of schools in May and the evidence from this user testing will inform the next stage of roll out.