Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many of the planned 6,500 new teachers will be delivered in South Shropshire constituency.

Delivering the government’s agenda to break down the barriers to opportunity relies on a highly skilled workforce in schools. There are now 468,693 full-time equivalent teachers in state-funded schools in England, but the department needs to do more to recruit additional teachers, especially in shortage subjects in secondary schools.

The department knows that high quality teaching is the factor that makes the biggest difference to a child’s education, which is why the government has set out the ambition to recruit an additional 6,500 new expert teachers. The department has taken the first steps towards this mission by restarting and expanding the teacher recruitment campaign, ‘Every Lesson Shapes a Life’. The Secretary of State for Education and her ministerial team are dedicated to working alongside education partners and have already begun restoring the relationship with the sector. The Secretary of State has already addressed over 14,000 people from the workforce in the first of many regular engagements and has committed to working alongside them to re-establish teaching as an attractive and expert profession.

The number of teachers in South Shropshire has remained stable, with 526 teachers in the 2023/24 academic year. The department is doing more to attract teachers in this area. Financial incentives are one of the most effective ways to increase teacher supply. The minimum starting salary for teachers in South Shropshire increased to £30,000 from the start of the 2023/24 academic year. Mathematics, physics, chemistry and computing teachers in the first five years of their careers, who chose to work in disadvantaged schools, receive retention payments worth up to £3,000 after tax. As the department works towards its ambition of recruiting 6,500 more teachers, it will do more to ensure teachers are attracted to the areas with the highest levels of need.

Alongside recruiting more teachers, the government is also committed to tackling retention challenges, making work pay, and supporting teachers to stay in the profession and thrive. We will be making further announcements on these issues in due course.

The department has published a range of resources to help address teacher workload and wellbeing and to support schools to introduce flexible working practices. The department's 'Improve workload and wellbeing for school staff service', which was developed alongside school leaders, includes a workload reduction toolkit to support schools to identify opportunities to cut excessive workload. The Education Staff Wellbeing Charter also sets out commitments from the government, Ofsted, schools and colleges to protect and promote the wellbeing of staff.