Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is talking to increase the recruitment of teachers in (a) rural and (b) coastal communities.

As at the last school workforce census (November 2022, published on 8 June 2023), the number of teachers remains high, with 468,400 full time equivalent (FTE) teachers working in state funded schools across the country. This is over 27,000 (6%) more than in 2010. The last school workforce census is available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.

The Department’s reforms are aimed at increasing teacher recruitment and at ensuring teachers across England stay and succeed 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 Department has extended bursary and scholarship eligibility to all non-UK national trainees in languages and physics.

The Department provides a Levelling Up Premium (LUP) worth up to £3,000 for mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computing teachers in the first five years of their careers who work in disadvantaged schools. Teachers in Education Investment Areas (EIAs) receive the highest LUP payments and many EIAs are predominantly rural. 69% of secondary or special schools in coastal towns (as defined by the ONS’ Coastal Towns 2020 analysis, which is available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/tourismindustry/articles/coastaltownsinenglandandwales/2020-10-06) are eligible for the LUP, compared to 59% of schools elsewhere in the country. The eligibility criteria and list of eligible schools is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/levelling-up-premium-payments-for-teachers.

The Department has also raised starting salaries outside London by 8.9% to £28,000 and remains committed to the Government’s ambition of 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. These include the school workload reduction toolkit and the education staff wellbeing charter. The toolkit is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit, and the wellbeing charter is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/education-staff-wellbeing-charter. More than 2,700 schools have signed up to the Charter so far.