Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to improve the recruitment and retention of teachers in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England.

The number of teachers remains high, with over 465,500 full time equivalent (FTE) teachers working in state funded schools across the country. This is over 24,000 more than in 2010. There are over 52,000 FTE teachers in the West Midlands, an increase of almost 1,300 since 2010. There are just under 3,200 in Coventry, an increase of almost 100 since 2010.

The Department announced a £181 million financial incentives package for those starting initial teacher training (ITT) in the 2023/24 academic year. The Department is providing bursaries worth up to £27,000 and scholarships worth up to £29,000 to encourage trainees to apply to train in key secondary subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computing. The Department has expanded the offer to international trainees in physics and languages.

The Department provides a Levelling Up Premium worth up to £3,000 annually for Mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computing teachers in the first five years of their careers who work in disadvantaged schools nationally, including within Education Investment Areas (EIAs). The Department provides the highest payments to teachers in eligible schools in EIAs. In the West Midlands, Coventry and four other Local Authorities are EIAs. There are seven schools in the Coventry North East constituency eligible for the Levelling Up Premium, as well as 27 schools in the Coventry area, and over 200 schools in the West Midlands. The eligibility criteria and list of eligible schools is available on GOV.UK: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/levelling-up-premium-payments-for-teachers.

The Department has recently raised starting salaries outside London by 8.9% to £28,000 and remains committed to the Department’s ambition of delivering £30,000 starting salaries to attract talented people to teaching.

In autumn 2021, the Department launched the ‘Apply for teacher training’ digital service. This enables a more streamlined, user friendly application route to attract and train teachers.

The Department will deliver 500,000 teacher training and development opportunities by the end of 2024, giving all teachers and school leaders access to world class, evidence based training and professional development at every stage of their career.

To support retention in the first few years of teaching, the Department has rolled out the Early Career Framework nationally, providing the foundations for a successful career in teaching. This is backed by over £130 million a year in funding.

The Department has also launched a new and updated suite of National Professional Qualifications for teachers and school leaders at all levels, from those who want to develop expertise in high quality teaching practice to those leading multiple schools across trusts.

The Department is committed to taking a whole school approach to mental health and wellbeing, and to ensuring that staff wellbeing policy is integrated within schools’ culture. The Department has published a range of resources to help address staff workload and wellbeing. This includes the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter, which the Department is encouraging schools to sign up to as a shared commitment to promote staff wellbeing. More than 2,400 schools have signed up to the Charter since it was launched in November 2021. The Department has also published the workload reduction toolkit, developed alongside school leadership staff to help reduce workload, and resources to support schools to implement effective flexible working practices. Additionally, before the COVID-19 pandemic, average teacher and headteacher working hours reduced by five hours per week over the previous three years, as found by the Teacher Workload Survey in 2019.