Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the most recent trends in the level of teacher recruitment and retention.

The number of teachers remains high, with over 453,000 teachers in our schools – 12,000 more than in 2010. Postgraduate recruitment to teacher training is at its highest level since 2010-11, with over 29,000 postgraduate trainees recruited in 2019-20. The department will continue to take action to ensure teaching remains an attractive and fulfilling career. The figures of postgraduate and undergraduate initial teacher training new entrants by academic year can be found in the table attached.

In 2019, the government published the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy, setting out how we will attract and retain great teachers. At the heart of the strategy is the Early Career Framework, which will provide new teachers with the solid foundations for a successful career in the profession.

The department has made significant progress in implementing the strategy since it was published. We have set out plans to significantly raise teachers’ starting pay to £30,000 by September 2022. We have also published a new Initial Teacher Training Core Content Framework, which will align with the Early Career Framework to ensure all teachers benefit from at least three years of evidence-based training. Additionally, the findings from the Teacher Workload Survey 2019 show that there has been a reduction in reported working hours for teachers, middle leaders and senior leaders of five hours a week between 2016 and 2019. While these findings suggest that our work and that of the profession is starting to make a real difference, we will continue to take action to tackle unnecessary workload.