Teacher vacancy levels at highest rate since records began - 3 things the Government needs to do to fix it

• A new report has found that unfilled vacancies for teachers have doubled since before the pandemic
• The Government is currently trying to recruit 6,500 more teachers
• An education research charity says that this summer’s spending review may be the last chance to turn things around this Parliamentary term

The Government has been warned that it’s “now or never” when it comes to recruiting thousands of promised teachers - but it’s going to take more funding, and a bit of thinking outside the box.

A new report by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), published last week, found that unfilled vacancies for teachers are at their highest rates since records began in 2010. This is despite plans by the Labour Government to recruit 6,500 new teachers - just one of a plethora of school-focused policies in the party’s ambitious education portfolio.

The analysis found that teacher leaving rates have not improved since before the pandemic, and that more of those leaving the field were still of working age, rather than retirement age. Recruitment into initial teacher training remained low too, NFER said, and there were about 6,000 unfilled vacancies in the 2023/24 school year - double the pre-pandemic rate, and six times higher than 2010/11.

The NFER warns that changes to improve staffing levels usually take a few years to have an effect, and so the Government’s June spending review may be its only chance to meet its recruitment target by the end of its term.

But the report didn’t just outline the extent of the problem. It also made a series of recommendations to Government and school leaders alike on how they could begin to set things right. Here were three of their key suggestions:

1. Higher pay rises - until at least 2029

The report calls for the School Teachers' Review Body (STRB) to recommend that the 2025/26 teacher pay award was above 3%. Currently, the Government is proposing a 2.8% increase for the upcoming school year.

On top of this, NFER wants the body - which advises the Government on pay and conditions for state school teachers in England - to give educators some assurance that its future recommendations would be above the forecasted rates of average earnings growth. This meant that the upcoming government spending review this summer would need to set aside enough in its schools budget to increase teachers’ pay by at least 6.1% from 2026/27 to 2028/29.

Co-author and NFER school workforce lead Jack Worth said that fully-funded pay increases that made teacher pay more competitive were “essential” to keeping teachers in the classroom and attracting new recruits. “The upcoming spending review provides the Government with the ideal opportunity to show its long-term commitment to increase the attractiveness of teaching.

“Both schools and the Government are facing budgetary challenges, so making this happen is going to need careful planning,” he continued.

NFER also recommended that the Government supplement these pay rises with financial incentives for teachers going into subjects where there was a shortage.

2. Do more to bring down the workload, even if it means turning to AI

Some 90% of teachers considering leaving teaching in 2023/24 cited high workload as a factor, the report found. During term time in the last school year, the average teacher worked five more hours each week than similar graduates in other jobs.

The NFER suggests that the Government should work to develop an official teacher workload reduction strategy, if it wants to improve retention.

But employers also had a part to play here. The Foundation asked schools to consider whether generative AI tools could help improve their teachers’ planning workload. Teachers who used ChatGPT to help with lesson planning spent, on average, 30% less time on it than teachers who did not, another recent NFER study had found, “with no evidence of negative impacts on the quality of materials or teachers’ sense of autonomy or creativity.”

School leaders were also asked to consider adopting a wider range of flexible working practices in their schools, which could once again help improve teacher retention.

3. A plan to improve ‘worsening’ student behaviour

Pupil behaviour has become one of the fastest-growing contributors to teacher workload since the pandemic, NFER said. Teachers’ and leaders’ perceptions of pupil behaviour in their school had worsened considerably since 2021/22.

The proportion of teachers who said they spend too much time responding to behaviour incidents has increased substantially, the report added. Government data also shows that suspensions and exclusions have both continued to rise noticeably on pre-pandemic levels, primarily due to disruptive behaviour.

The report acknowledged that while the drivers of “worsening” pupil behaviour could be complex and multifaceted, a plan for handling it needed to come from the top. NFER recommended that the Government develop a new approach for supporting schools to improve pupil behaviour - backed up by both improved external school support services, and extra funding in the summer spending review.

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What does the Government say?

In response to the report, a Department for Education spokesperson told the BBC that £233 million of funding for next year was available to “encourage more talented people into the classroom to teach subjects including maths, physics, chemistry and computing”.

In the 2024/25 school year, teachers received an above-inflation pay increase of 5.5%, they continued. Schools were also being encouraged to allow staff to work in more flexible ways, to both ease workloads and improve wellbeing.

Do you think these measures could help recruit and retain more teachers? If not, what do you think is the answer? Have your say and make your voice heard by leaving a comment below.