Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department has altered its targets for trainee (a) modern foreign language and (b) religious education secondary school teacher recruitment for 2022-23, in the context of levels of recruitment of teachers for those subjects in previous years.

The table below shows the percentage of the postgraduate Initial Teacher Training (ITT) target achieved in religious education and modern foreign languages for the years shown.

Source: DfE ITT Census statistical publications

To note:

1. Refers to the ITT Census year
2. All figures given are revised.
3. Cumulative performance has not been presented in the table for the following reasons. Doing this could create a misleading answer, as recruitment could be particularly strong/weak during individual years.T he methodology for calculating targets has also changed during this period as the Department moved from the Teacher Supply Model to the Teacher Workforce Model. The chosen approach gives the most robust answer, controlling for year on year shifts in the data, whilst staying true to the question.

The Department estimates the number of postgraduate ITT trainees required to meet teacher demand in England each year using the teacher workforce model. The model includes an adjustment to build in any impacts of recruitment being below target for the two previous ITT recruitment rounds, for both primary, and each secondary subject.

The model uses ITT recruitment data, ITT completion and post-ITT employment rates to estimate the number of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) entering the workforce having trained via all forms of ITT in the two most recent ITT cycles.