Question to the Department for Education:

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

The latest School Workforce Census, which was published on 8 June 2023, shows the number of teachers remains high, with 468,400 full time equivalent (FTE) teachers working in state funded schools across the country. This is over 27,000 more than in 2010. In November 2022, when the latest available data was collected, there were 3,284 FTE teachers in state funded schools in Coventry. This is an increase of 3.2% from the year previous when there were 3,182 FTE teachers in state funded schools in Coventry and an increase of 6.3% since 2010 when the school workforce census began when there were 3,090 FTE teachers in state funded schools in Coventry. Over this period, the number of schools in Coventry included in the school workforce census has ranged between 112 to 120. School Workforce Census data can be found online at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.

The Department’s reforms are aimed at increasing teacher recruitment and ensuring teachers across England stay in the profession.

The Department announced a financial incentives package worth up to £181 million 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 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. Coventry is an EIA. There are seven schools in the Coventry North East constituency eligible for the Levelling Up Premium and 26 schools in the Coventry Local Authority. The eligibility criteria and list of eligible schools is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/levelling-up-premium-payments-for-teachers.

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

To support retention across all areas, the Department has worked with the education sector and published a range of resources to help address staff workload and wellbeing. This includes the workload reduction toolkit, which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit and the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter, which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/education-staff-wellbeing-charter. More than 2,600 schools have signed up to the Charter so far.