Further Education: Staff

(asked on 10th March 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate his Department has made of staff vacancy rates in the specialist further education sector; what assessment he has made of the impact of vacancy rates on FE colleges' ability to (i) meet the needs of current students and (ii) admit new students; and what steps his Department is taking to support specialist further education providers to meet staffing requirements.


Answered by
Alex Burghart Portrait
Alex Burghart
Parliamentary Secretary (Cabinet Office)
This question was answered on 17th March 2022

Local authorities are best placed to understand the capacity of their local further education (FE) provision to accommodate additional children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

The department does not currently collect data centrally on available capacity in high needs provision. However, it is continuing to work with local authorities to better understand future demand for SEND provision, including in FE settings, as it considers how it can best support the sector.

It is essential that all learners in the FE sector, including those with complex special needs, experience the highest quality teaching. The department recognises that teacher recruitment and retention can be challenging for providers. To support this, the government is investing £50 million in programmes designed to improve the supply and quality of FE teachers, in the current financial year.

In January 2022, we launched a recruitment campaign to raise awareness of the opportunities to teach in FE with a wider audience. For those choosing to specialise in SEND teaching in the FE sector, the department has also announced that it will offer tax-free training bursaries worth £15,000 each for the further academic year of 2022/23. This will help to boost the supply of teachers with specialist training to support learners with SEND in the FE sector.

The department is also investing £2.6 billion between 2022 and 2025 to deliver new places and improve existing provisions for children and young people with SEND or who require alternative provision. This funding represents a transformational investment in new high needs provision. It will help deliver tens of thousands of new high needs places, including in post-16 and FE settings.

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