Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to reduce the pupils per teacher ratio in secondary schools.

As the context of individual schools is different, there are varying approaches to effective staff deployment. It is for school leaders to determine how best to deploy their teachers and the Government trusts them to make the right staffing decisions for their schools. The Department is committed to supporting schools to achieve excellent outcomes for pupils with a wide range of different staffing models.

The Department is also working to ensure school leaders can access the advice, tools and data they need to make the best use of school resources and plan their workforce deployment effectively and efficiently. We have published practical guidance and tools on school resource management, including the School Workforce Planning Guidance[1], which encourages school leaders to plan their workforce together with the curriculum and finances over three to five years.

The Department is taking steps to keep teachers in the classroom so that the teaching workforce is as strong as possible. In January 2019, we launched the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy, which set out four priorities to attract and retain teachers in the profession. We will transform support for early career teachers through the Early Career Framework (ECF), which will underpin a two-year package of structured training and support for early career teachers, backed by £130 million a year in funding when fully rolled out in 2021.

The other key priorities set out in the strategy are around making it easier to train to become a teacher, supporting schools to establish more supportive school cultures, and developing coherent career pathways for those teachers who wish to stay and excel in the classroom.

In addition, the Department plans to raise starting salaries for new teachers to £30,000 by 2022-23, aligning teaching with other top graduate professions. We have introduced financial incentives including bursaries of up to £26,000 for mathematics, physics and modern foreign languages trainees, as well as early career payments for new chemistry, languages, mathematics and physics trainees in 2020-21, in order to encourage good trainees to join and remain in the profession.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-workforce-planning