Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to increase recruitment of (1) Black, (2) Asian, and (3) other ethnic minority, teachers.

We recognise the importance of having a diverse teaching workforce. It enriches our schools, benefits our teachers and supports more diverse role models for our young people.

The department is building and rolling out a new application service for initial teacher training (ITT). ‘Apply for teacher training’ has been designed and extensively tested with a diverse range of potential applicants, to ensure it helps remove barriers to potentially great teachers applying for ITT courses. ‘Apply for teacher training’ is currently in public beta, running alongside the existing application service for teacher training: https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-teacher-training. As we roll the service out further, we will continue to develop and test interventions to support people from diverse backgrounds to become teachers.

The department’s ‘Teaching – Every Lesson Shapes A Life’ recruitment campaign is targeted at audiences of students, recent graduates and potential career changers inclusive of all ethnicities, and we take every effort to ensure that our advertising is fully reflective of this across the full range of marketing materials we use.

Our two most recent TV advertisements reflect the diversity of the profession, featuring teachers from black, Asian and ethnic minorities (BAME) in both primary and secondary settings. We also feature BAME teachers across the rest of our campaign, including in newspapers, email communications, printed information materials, on the internet and across social media, which helps us to achieve this balance overall.