Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to improve the (a) recruitment and (b) retention of teachers in (i) Enfield North constituency and (ii) Enfield.

There are now over 468,000 full time equivalent (FTE) teachers in state-funded schools in England, which is an increase of 2,800 (less than 1%) since last year, and an increase of 27,000 (6%) since 2010. This makes it the highest FTE of teachers since the School Workforce Census began in 2010.

The Department’s reforms are aimed at increasing teacher recruitment and at ensuring teachers across England stay and thrive in the profession.

The Department announced a financial incentives package worth up to £181 million for those starting initial teacher training (ITT) in the 2023/24 academic year. The Department is providing bursaries worth up to £27,000 and scholarships worth up to £29,000 to encourage trainees to apply to train in key secondary subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computing.

The Government remains committed to delivering £30,000 starting salaries to attract talented people to teaching.

To support retention across all areas, the Department has worked with the education sector and published a range of resources to help address staff workload and wellbeing. This includes the published workload reduction toolkit, which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit, and the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter, which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/education-staff-wellbeing-charter. More than 2,600 schools have signed up to the Charter so far.