Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to (a) encourage people to enter the teaching profession and (b) improve staff retention in the education sector.

Recent data shows that there are now over 468,000 full time equivalent (FTE) teachers in state funded schools in England, an increase of 27,000 (6%) since 2010. This makes it the highest number of FTE teachers on record since the School Workforce Census began in 2010.

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

The Get Into Teaching service helps make teaching a career of choice and supports candidates to apply for teacher training. Prospective trainees can access support and advice through expert one to one teacher training advisers, a contact centre and a national programme of events. The teaching marketing campaign provides inspiration and support to explore a career in teaching and directs people to the Get Into Teaching service: https://getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/.

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. Additionally, for 2022/23, the Department raised starting salaries outside London by 8.9% to £28,000.

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. 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 created an entitlement to at least three years of structured training, support and professional development for all new teachers, underpinned by the Initial Teacher Training Core Content Framework available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/initial-teacher-training-itt-core-content-framework and the Early Career Framework available at: 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 in the sector, the Department has worked with the education sector and published a range of resources to help address staff workload and wellbeing and support schools to introduce flexible working practices. This includes the workload reduction toolkit available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit and the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/education-staff-wellbeing-charter. More than 2,700 schools have signed up to the Charter so far.