Oral Answers to Questions

Grahame Morris Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I have not seen the hon. Lady’s Bill, but I would be happy to take a look and have a discussion with her.

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

10. What steps she is taking to support the recruitment and retention of teachers in the further education sector.

[Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)]

22. What recent estimate she has made of the number of teachers leaving the teaching profession.

[Grahame Morris]

The further education sector is facing a teaching crisis, not fully addressed by the pay review body. In my constituency, East Durham College has had two teacher vacancies in engineering and a computer science position unfilled for 18 months. Barriers to recruitment include high workload, qualification reform, excessive assessment and a huge pay disparity compared with comparable work in industry. Could the Secretary of State tell us what steps she is taking to ensure that further education teaching is an attractive and viable career?

[Gillian Keegan]

I very much care about further education and ensuring that it has the funding. That is why, as of last week, we are investing an additional £185 million in the financial year 2023-24 and £285 million in 2024-25 to drive forward skills delivery in further education. The Government do not set pay for the FE sector. However, I have been clear that I expect that funding, which is new funding, to go to the frontline. I hope the investment will support the FE sector to address its recruitment and retention challenges. In addition, we introduced bursaries of £29,000 for STEM—science, technology, engineering and maths—subjects, and the Taking Teaching Further programme is working with industry and paying £6,000 to attract those from industry who want to spend their second career in FE teaching.