Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the policy paper entitled Plan for Change, published on 5 December 2024, CP1210, at what grades new teachers will be recruited; and if she will publish recruitment targets by subject area.

​​Recruiting and retaining more qualified, expert teachers is critical to the government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity and boost the life chances for every child. The within school factor that makes the biggest difference to a young person’s educational outcome is high-quality teaching. Yet this government has inherited a system with critical shortages of teachers with numbers not keeping pace with demographic changes.

This is why the government has set out the ambition to recruit 6,500 new expert teachers across our schools, both mainstream and specialist, and our colleges over the course of this Parliament, including targeting shortage subjects.

The department will continue to work alongside the sector as it develops its delivery plan and seeks to re-establish teaching as an attractive profession. The department’s measures will include getting more teachers into shortage subjects, supporting areas that face recruitment challenges and tackling retention issues.

The department has already made good early progress towards this key pledge by accepting in full the 5.5% pay award, by expanding our ‘Every Lesson Shapes a Life’ recruitment campaign, by making £233 million available for bursaries in 2025/26 and by doubling retention payments for new teachers of mathematics, physics, chemistry and computing working in disadvantaged schools.

However, the best recruitment strategy is a retention strategy to ensure teachers stay and thrive in the profession. This is why the department is doing more to support workload and wellbeing. This includes introducing new report cards to replace Ofsted single-word judgements to provide parents with a clear picture of their schools and proportionate accountability for schools, allowing teacher’s planning, preparation and assessment time to be taken from home and making key resources to support well-being, developed with school leaders, available to teachers.