Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to (a) recruit and (b) retain teachers.

The number of teachers remains high, with over 461,000 (full-time equivalent) working in schools across the country, 20,000 more than in 2010.

The department aims to continue attracting and retaining the highly skilled teachers that every child needs. To do this, we are taking action to improve teacher recruitment and retention by transforming the training and support we provide, not only to attract more people into teaching, but to encourage them to stay and thrive in the profession.

The department is creating an entitlement to at least three years of structured training, support and professional development for all new teachers, to bring teaching into line with other prestigious professions such as law, accountancy and medicine. Underpinning this is the new Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Core Content Framework and the Early Career Framework. Together, these ensure that new teachers will benefit from at least three years of evidence-based training, across ITT and into their induction.

Beyond the first few years of teaching, our priority is to help all teachers and school leaders to continuously develop their expertise throughout their careers so every child in every classroom in every school gets the best start in life. Teachers and school leaders at all levels can now benefit from an updated suite of National Professional Qualifications. Aimed at those who want to develop expertise in high-quality teaching practice, to those leading multiple schools across trusts, these professional development programmes are now free to access for those eligible to apply.

These measures will create a golden thread running from ITT through to school leadership, rooting teacher and leader development in the best available evidence.

To support recruitment and retention of specialist teachers in subjects that are harder to recruit for, we have put in place a range of measures, including bursaries worth £24,000 tax-free and scholarships worth £26,000 tax-free. This will encourage talented trainees for key subjects such as chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics. Additionally, we have announced a Levelling Up Premium worth up to £3,000 tax-free for maths, physics, chemistry and computing teachers in years 1 to 5 of their careers.

The deparment remains committed to increasing teacher starting salaries to £30,000 to make teaching an attractive graduate option. We are continuing our efforts to support teacher wellbeing, including by launching the education staff wellbeing charter, and driving down unnecessary burdens and reducing teacher workload though the use of our workload reduction toolkit. Further information on the staff wellbeing charter and workload reduction toolkit are available here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/education-staff-wellbeing-charter and https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit.