Primary Education: Teachers

(asked on 8th November 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what (a) steps his Department is taking and (b) incentives his Department is offering to help increase the proportion of male teachers in primary education.


Answered by
Robin Walker Portrait
Robin Walker
This question was answered on 17th November 2021

Schools should reflect society and the communities they serve, and it is important to attract and retain high-skilled, talented men into teaching.

The department does this through effective pay structures and by ensuring teaching remains a financially rewarding career. We remain committed to increasing teacher starting salaries to £30,000 to make teaching an attractive graduate option. While the pay restraint in academic year 2021/22 means we are now delivering this commitment to a revised timescale, the 5.5% uplift to starting pay in September 2020 has already made a substantial difference to the competitiveness of the early career pay offer.

The department’s ‘Teaching – Every Lesson Shapes A Life’ recruitment campaign is targeted at audiences of students, recent graduates and potential career changers regardless of gender, and we take every effort to ensure that our advertising is fully reflective of this across the full range of marketing materials we use.

In October, Apply for Teacher Training (Apply), our new application service for initial teacher training (ITT) in England, was rolled out nationally. Apply has been designed to be user-friendly and has been extensively tested with a diverse range of potential applicants, including men, to ensure it helps remove barriers to great teachers applying for ITT courses. Apply will also allow us to collect more data, giving us greater insight into candidate behaviour and the behaviour of providers of teacher training so that the department can identify barriers and work closely with ITT providers to explore, design and test new interventions to recruit more candidates from under-represented backgrounds into the sector.

Alongside a focus on recruitment, it is important we retain male teachers. This will be supported by our work to ensure that all new entrants to teacher training have the best possible start to the early stage of their career, regardless of gender.

World-class programmes developed by the Department for Education to support the school workforce, including our Early Career Framework (ECF) reforms for those at the beginning of careers and National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) to develop our best teaching and leadership talent, is the best training for everyone whatever their background. The ECF reforms provide a funded entitlement for all early career teachers in England to access high quality professional development at the start of their careers. NPQs are now freely available to all teachers in state-funded schools, as well as state-funded 16-19 organisations.

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