Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what (a) assessment he has made of the adequacy of the number of teachers and (b) steps he is taking to improve teacher retention.

The number of teachers remains high, with 461,088 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff working in schools across the country. This is approximately 20,000 more than in 2010.

The 2020/21 academic year saw an increase of more than 7,275 in FTE teachers in state-funded schools in England. This equates to a 1.6% growth on the year before, the largest observed in the last 10 years, and has resulted in the largest qualified teacher stock since the school workforce census began in 2010/11.

We have provisionally recruited 37,069 new entrants to initial teacher training (ITT) in the 2021/22 academic year compared to 40,377 (revised) in 2020/21, and 33,799 in 2019/20 before the COVID-19 outbreak. This is a decrease of 8% compared to 2020/21, but an increase of 10% compared to 2019/20.

In terms of retention, over two-thirds of teachers who started 5 years ago are still teaching today, and of those who started 10 years ago, nearly 3 in five 5 still teaching.

However, we recognise more needs to be done. One of our top priorities is to ensure that we continue to attract, retain and develop the highly skilled teachers we need to inspire the next generation, attract more people into teaching and enable them to succeed.

We are creating an entitlement to at least 3 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 ITT core content framework and the early career framework. Together, these ensure that new teachers will benefit from at least 3 years of evidence based training, across ITT and into their induction.

Teacher retention is key to ensuring effective teacher supply and quality, and we are taking action to support teachers to stay in the profession and thrive. We have published a range of resources to help address teacher workload and wellbeing, and support schools to introduce flexible working practices. These include the staff wellbeing charter and the workload reduction toolkit.

We remain committed to increasing teacher starting salaries to £30,000 so that teaching remains an attractive graduate option.

Additionally, we are offering tax-free bursaries worth £24,000 and scholarships worth £26,000 to encourage talented trainees into physics, chemistry, mathematics, and computing, as well as bursaries worth £15,000 in languages, geography and design and technology, and £10,000 in biology. We have also recently 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. This will support recruitment and retention of specialist teachers in these subjects and in the schools and areas that need them most.