Teachers: Recruitment

(asked on 12th January 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the former teachers who have responded to his request that they return to teaching, how many such teachers were in classrooms in England as of 12 January 2022.


Answered by
Robin Walker Portrait
Robin Walker
This question was answered on 20th January 2022

The department is extremely grateful to all the teachers who are responding to our call to return temporarily to the classroom to support schools to remain open and deliver face to face education for pupils.

On 12 January 2022, the department published initial data from a sample of supply agencies gathered between 20 December 2021 and 7 January 2022. This showed that 485 former teachers have signed up with supply agencies, and over 100 Teach First alumni have also expressed interest in returning to the classroom.

Given the size of the sample, the true number of sign-ups since the call was launched will be larger. Full details of the data release can be found here; https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/number-of-ex-teachers-joining-the-school-workforce-2021-to-2022. We remain in close contact with supply agencies to monitor the interest they receive to help schools during this time.

We will keep the need for further data collections under review.

We directed the call for former teachers through employment agencies as they are best placed to match the supply that is coming forward with the demand that is there from schools. Using employment agencies also reduces the administrative burden of temporary recruitment from our schools.

We need to balance the need for data with the burden we place on those collating it, so we did not request information by region, upper/lower tier local authority or parliamentary constituency, and the employment agencies that are working with us have no reason to sort and organise their candidates in such a way. Where a specific supply teacher is prepared to work will differ from individual to individual for many different reasons.

Between 16 December 2021 and 4 January 2022, there were over 244,000 unique page impressions and over 86,000 unique visitors to the Get into Teaching website. There were over 41,000 unique impressions on the page containing the urgent call to qualified teachers up to 12 January 2022. In the same period last year, there were over 388,000 unique page impressions and over 108,000 unique visitors to the website, although the data is not directly comparable as the Get into Teaching website was relaunched on 8 April 2021.

The new site has condensed much of the information on the legacy website, meaning that year-on-year figures are not directly comparable. Engagement levels remain consistent, with users spending similar amounts of time on the new website. In addition, we saw increased interest in teaching during the first year of the COVID-19 outbreak, which was reflected in a particularly high number of visitors to the website.

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