Asked by: Sarah Jones (Labour - Croydon West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the amount spent by schools in England on agency supply teachers for each of the last five years.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department publishes the amount spent by schools on agency supply teaching staff (as well as costs and receipts from supply teacher insurance) annually for local authority maintained schools, and for academies. Published schools’ Consistent Financial Reporting and Academies’ Accounting Returns are available at the following link: https://schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk/Help/DataSources.
Data from previous years is also available, for local authority maintained schools from 2010, and for academies from 2012.
Asked by: Sarah Jones (Labour - Croydon West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the proportion of staff teaching in schools in England who are (a) permanent and (b) supply teachers for each of the last five years.
Answered by Nick Gibb
There are 451,870 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers in service in state funded schools in England as of November 2017. Schools will always have some vacancies, temporarily filled vacancies or staff absences. They use occasional and other supply teachers to meet these demands. These teachers may not be fully reflected within FTE figures as these include only teachers who have a contract of over 28 days duration or, in the case of occasional teachers, are employed by the school on the day data is collected.
The Department collects details of teachers working in state funded schools through the annual School Workforce Census. The census does identify those teachers who are employed via a service agreement with an agency but not whether they are a supply teacher.
The following table provides the numbers and proportions of FTE teachers by their contract agreement type and the headcount number of occasional teachers in state funded schools in England for November 2013 to 2017:
| 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 |
CONTRACT TYPE[1] |
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Permanent | 404,124 | 407,397 | 409,801 | 411,943 | 409,878 |
Fixed term | 24,529 | 25,978 | 26,000 | 25,320 | 24,133 |
Temporary | 17,867 | 17,616 | 17,116 | 16,091 | 14,635 |
Service Agreement with an Agency | 2,465 | 3,226 | 3,286 | 3,194 | 2,751 |
Service Agreement with Local Authority | 335 | 343 | 245 | 254 | 161 |
Service Agreement with Other Source | 338 | 394 | 413 | 431 | 291 |
Unknown | 5 | 16 | 4 | 4 | 21 |
Total | 449,663 | 454,969 | 456,865 | 457,236 | 451,870 |
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Head count of occasional teachers[2] | 13,484 | 14,105 | 13,064 | 12,783 | 11,757 |
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PERCENTAGE |
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|
|
|
Permanent | 89.9 | 89.5 | 89.7 | 90.1 | 90.7 |
Fixed term | 5.5 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.5 | 5.3 |
Temporary | 4.0 | 3.9 | 3.7 | 3.5 | 3.2 |
Service Agreement with an Agency | 0.5 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 0.6 |
Service Agreement with a Local Authority | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.0 |
Service Agreement with another Source | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 |
Unknown | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
Total | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
Source: School Workforce Census
The Department uses the Teacher Supply Model to estimate national postgraduate Initial Teacher Training place requirements for primary and each secondary subject and as part of this, estimates the longer term future demand for teachers in English state-funded schools. The most recently published model is available at the following web link: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tsm-and-initial-teacher-training-allocations-2019-to-2020
[1] Teachers are recorded for those who have a contract of a least 28 days duration who are in service on the date of the census in November each year.
[2] Occasional teachers are a headcount of teachers with a contract of less than 28 days who were in school on the census day in November.
Asked by: Sarah Jones (Labour - Croydon West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the number of knife offences taking place on school premises.
Answered by Nick Gibb
No one should ever feel the need to take weapons into schools. Doing so is likely to be a criminal offence. Schools have a statutory power to search for and confiscate prohibited items such as knives and weapons.
The Department has produced advice for schools which makes it clear that school staff can search pupils or their possessions, without consent, where there are reasonable grounds to do so. The guidance is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/searching-screening-and-confiscation. If a pupil refuses to be searched, the school may bar them from the premises.
The Department is working with the Home Office to consider how we can reinforce the message that it is unacceptable to bring knives or weapons into schools. As part of this work, the Department is considering how it can further strengthen the advice and support it provides to schools.
Asked by: Sarah Jones (Labour - Croydon West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of including knife crime prevention as a factor in school Ofsted inspections.
Answered by Nick Gibb
A school’s arrangements for protecting pupils are already a mandatory part of Ofsted inspection. Ofsted’s guidance document, “Inspecting safeguarding in early years, education and skills”, states that safeguarding action by providers may be needed to protect children from a range of risks including issues that may be specific to a local area or population, for example gang activity and youth violence. The document is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inspecting-safeguarding-in-early-years-education-and-skills-from-september-2015.
Inspectors consider how well lead teachers have created a culture of vigilance and how well schools fulfil their statutory and other responsibilities in keeping children safe.
Ofsted is aware that there may be dimensions to this problem that it needs to understand better in order for inspectors to be able to inspect safeguarding more effectively and it is planning a new research project in the London region to investigate this in more depth.