Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department are taking to address the recruitment and retention of teachers in Harpenden and Berkhamsted.

Recruiting and retaining expert teachers is critical to the government’s mission to break down the barriers to opportunity for every child, as high-quality teaching is the factor that has the biggest positive impact on a child’s outcomes in school.

In February the department published its delivery plan which sets how we will recruit 6,500 secondary, special school and further education teachers over the course of this Parliament, focussing on three key themes: attracting, retaining and developing teachers.

We have now achieved 71.6% of the 6,500 additional teachers target, with 3,008 more teachers in secondary and special schools in 2025/26 than in 2024/25. In Harpenden and Berkhamsted, there was an increase of 15 teachers across secondary and special schools in 2025/26.

Our school teacher pipeline is also growing, there were 32,576 new entrants to initial teacher training in autumn 2025, up 13% from the previous year, while the latest school workforce census reported the lowest leaver rate (8.5%) in any year outside the pandemic.