Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Initial teacher training market review report published in July 2021, what plans his Department has made to tackle the potential shortfall in teacher trainee positions.

The review has focused on producing recommendations aimed at increasing the quality, consistency, and coherence of Initial Teacher Training (ITT) for trainee teachers. Ensuring there are sufficient well-trained teachers in the subjects that schools want is one of the priorities of the review and the Department will be proceeding carefully to make sure this is maintained.

To deliver the quality requirements set out in the report, ITT providers would have to consider how they are going to do this successfully, and the Department anticipates that some market reconfiguration and the development of new capacity will be necessary in order to do so. We intend to respond to the report and its recommendations this autumn. If the recommendations are accepted, the Department’s priority during the transition period to any new configuration will be ensuring that the capacity continues to exist, in all parts of the country, to offer enough training places to meet the continuing teacher supply needs across the whole education system.