Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure equity in the initial teacher education accreditation process for students.

The department’s teacher recruitment campaigns are targeted at audiences of students, recent graduates, and potential career changers regardless of their identity or background. We take every effort to ensure that our advertising is fully reflective of this across the full range of marketing materials we use. New ‘Bring It’ creative materials, introduced in January 2022 also strongly reflect the diversity of our young target audiences and the fact that this generation value diversity and want reassurance that teaching is for people like them.

Last year, Apply for Teacher Training, our new application service for initial teacher training (ITT) in England,  was rolled out nationally. Apply has been designed to be as user-friendly as possible and has been extensively tested with a diverse range of potential applicants to ensure it helps remove barriers to great teachers applying for ITT courses.

Apply for Teacher Training will also allow the department to collect more data, giving us greater insight into candidate behaviour and the behaviour of teacher training providers so that we can identify barriers and work to address them. The department will continue to work closely with ITT providers to explore, design and test new interventions to ensure teaching is an inclusive career that is open to candidates from all backgrounds.

This year, the department produced specific guidance for providers on how to treat candidates fairly during recruitment. This guidance is published here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/treating-candidates-fairly-when-you-recruit-trainee-teachers.

As recommended by the independent review of the ITT market, all existing and new providers of ITT courses are required to undergo an accreditation process to demonstrate that, from September 2024, they will be able to meet the standard set by the new ITT Quality Requirements. The accreditation process is ongoing and the second application round will close on 27 June. All organisations that submit an application for accreditation as a provider of ITT are treated equitably, with applications assessed through an impartial process, by trained assessors.