Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of the trends in the level of teacher recruitment.

High-quality teaching is the biggest in-school factor that makes a difference to a child’s education, so having sufficient expert teachers is critical to the government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity and boost the life chances for every child. This government has inherited a system with critical shortages of teachers, with numbers not keeping pace with demographic changes.

Information on the school workforce, including the number of teachers entering and leaving service in state-funded schools, is published in the ‘School workforce in England’ statistical publication which is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.

Under the previous government, the rates and numbers of entrants to the state-funded teaching profession in England decreased in 2023/24, while the rates and numbers of leavers from to the state-funded teaching profession in England remained stable. While leavers have returned to pre-pandemic levels, entrants have returned to figures similar to the 2021/22 academic year. Each year, the number of teachers entering state-funded schools in England is higher than those leaving.

With regards recruitment of trainee teachers, information on the numbers and characteristics of new entrants to initial teacher training (ITT) in England is published in the ‘ITT census’ statistical publication which is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/initial-teacher-training-census.

In 2024/25, there were 27,836 new entrants to ITT, a 6% increase compared to the revised figure of 26,376 in 2023/24. This reverses a trend of year-on-year decreases since the pandemic period with a high of 40,377 new entrants in 2020/21. Despite the increase in the latest year, numbers of entrants remain below pre-pandemic levels.

Postgraduate ITT targets for 2024/25 were set using analysis from the Teacher Workforce Model which can be viewed here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/postgraduate-initial-teacher-training-targets.

The percentage of the postgraduate ITT target achieved for all subjects (secondary and primary) was 69%. This is an increase of 9 percentage points, up from 60% in 2023/24.

The department is committed to recruiting an additional 6,500 new expert teachers across our schools, both mainstream and specialist, and our colleges over the course of this Parliament, which is why this government accepted the School Teachers’ Review Body’s recommendation of a 5.5% pay award for teachers and leaders in maintained schools from last September. To further boost recruitment, we announced an ITT financial incentives package for the 2025/26 recruitment cycle worth £233 million, a £37 million increase on the last cycle. This includes a range of measures, including bursaries worth £29,000 tax-free and scholarships worth £31,000 tax-free, to encourage talented trainees to train in key subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and computing.