Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department are taking to improve the (a) recruitment and (b) retention rate of teachers.

There are now over 468,000 full time equivalent (FTE) teachers in state funded schools in England, which is an increase of 2,800 (less than 1%) since last year, and an increase of 27,000 (6%) since 2010. This makes it the highest FTE of teachers since the School Workforce Census began in 2010. Just over two thirds of teachers who qualified five years ago are still teaching.

The Department’s reforms are aimed at increasing teacher recruitment and at ensuring teachers across England stay and thrive 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 eligibility criteria and list of eligible schools are 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.

The Department has created an entitlement to at least three years of structured training, support, and professional development for all new teachers, underpinned by the ITT Core Content Framework and the Early Career Framework (ECF). Further information on the ITT Core Content Framework can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/initial-teacher-training-itt-core-content-framework. Further information on the ECF can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-career-framework. Together, these ensure that new teachers will benefit from at least three years of evidence based training, across ITT and into their induction.

To support retention, the Department has worked with the education sector and published a range of resources to help address staff workload and wellbeing and to support schools to introduce flexible working practices. This includes the workload reduction toolkit and the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter. Further information on the workload reduction toolkit can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit. Further information on the Education Staff Wellbeing charter 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.