Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere, published in March 2016, what the timetable is for the launch of the national teacher vacancy website; and if she will make a statement.

The Department is undertaking user research with head teachers, school business managers and recruitment staff as well as returning, aspiring and newly qualified teachers, to strengthen its understanding of the issues schools face when advertising teacher vacancies and the challenges teachers have finding and applying for jobs. The Department is using this information in the development and design of a new national teacher vacancy service. We are currently at an early stage of prototyping the new service and testing, to ensure the service meets the needs of users. Depending on the outcome of this development phase, we could expect to start building a service early in 2018. We will provide further details in due course.