Labour’s teachers drive must prioritise retention too

Good morning. A moving email to Inside Politics by an ex-state secondary school teacher on why she quit prompted me to dig into the teacher supply shortage. So, today I look at the crisis engulfing recruitment for secondary school subjects, which languishes so much that the sector’s independent review body has recommended the government target pay by subject in a “fair and reasonable” way. Nonetheless, it would be a controversial move to boost numbers.

Thank you for your readership and thoughtful replies.

Stemming the tide

“The fact that retention is an increasing problem highlights that things are not right within the sector,” writes our reader (who wishes to be anonymous). She mainly taught art but sometimes physics and sciences over seven years.

Lack of work flexibility and the health effects of a “repeated cycle of burnout” led her to leave — observing similar experiences among many peers. “This caused me to feel a great deal of sadness as I had put everything into becoming a good teacher.”

Labour has earmarked £450mn a year for its pledge to hire 6,500 more teachers over five years (that’s about one extra teacher between four schools), as warning signs flash across the board. The National Foundation for Educational Research predicted the government would miss its teacher recruitment target again this year — the 11th time in 12 years. Full and part-time vacancies have jumped. Seven subject associations have warned of the “endemic use of non-specialists in the classroom”. 

Secondary subjects are doing particularly badly, and some fare worse than others:

Hari Rentala of the Institute of Physics in September told the Education Committee why numbers of specialist physics teachers are only at 17 per cent of the government’s target: 

Imagine you . . . start at a school where you are the only physics teacher. Sixty per cent of your timetable is teaching biology and chemistry, despite the fact that you have not done that since you were 16. Every week you are preparing for 20 unique classes, 12 of which are in a subject that you do not know very well. You are working evenings and weekends, you feel underprepared for many of your classes, you feel like you are not getting much reward from what you are doing and you feel isolated and lonely. At some point over the next few years, with a heavy heart, you join the roughly 40 per cent to 50 per cent of early career physics teachers who leave during the first five years.

I chatted to Jonathan Clingman, a secondary physics teacher who delayed joining the profession following training because they feared the excessive workload (the biggest reason driving teachers to leave). “[My department] relies very strongly on specialists for advice,” Clingman said. If Clingman, a physics graduate, was unsure of how to present a biology module, they would go to a biologist for help.

And you can’t run subjects at A-level without those qualified specialists (though, as Rentala noted, some are teaching A-level physics despite not having done the course themselves and are “reading ahead of the class”).

During a postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) placement, Clingman knew one teacher who quit mid-year and wasn’t replaced for several months. “The kids didn’t have stability because they had a different teacher each time; available science teachers were rotated out of their own lessons to teach this person’s lessons; dividing students between other classes of 35-40 . . . but that’s the tip of the iceberg.” I learnt of schools having lecture-style maths lessons because they didn’t have the staff to teach it in regular-size classes. As the School Teachers’ Review Body highlighted in its annual report last week:

All of this implies why a framework of paying people according to their subject would fall down in principle and in practice. Schools function because they are interdisciplinary. The core “people” skills required apply to every discipline.

The new government accepted the STRB’s 5.5 per cent pay increase recommendation for 2024-25. But “given the magnitude of the current undersupply”, the STRB urged further action to address subject-specific teacher shortages. It floated pay by subject (which happens already in a bitty-er way), under some big provisos: that the competitiveness of teachers’ earnings — which it says have declined by 18 per cent in real terms since 2010-11 — is “materially repositioned”. The report explored potential approaches, referencing research showing retention payments had positive results among maths and physics early career teachers.

According to NEOST, the national body representing teacher employers, 58 per cent of Academy Trusts back “pay by subject”, compared with 38 per cent of local authorities. The consulted unions opposed it, raising potential unfairness. Education secretary Bridget Phillipson was also unimpressed when Schools Week reported in January 2023 that her predecessor was “keen” to discuss the policy in union talks.

Beyond pay and workload, more could be done to ease STEM specialists into teaching — where retention has been a long-running sore, as this chart shows. That could mean introducing teaching modules in, say, physics undergraduate degrees to nurture communication skills that equip them better for the classroom.

Clingman again: “Some physics graduates on my PGCE course had applied because teaching made sense as a career path, but once they actually got into schools they found the demands on them overwhelming . . . and decided it wasn’t for them.

“The way to get graduates of technical subjects into teaching is to start preparing them for people-centred careers earlier.” More funding for subject-specific professional development courses, and for training managers to support staff wellbeing, could also improve confidence within schools. Better flexibility, too.

This topic is too huge for one newsletter! The retention difficulty in secondary teaching is one of the many “hidden” failings that Labour, set to review the curriculum, must grapple with. That “pay by subject” has resurfaced in discussions underlines the severity of the challenge. Until Labour specifies how it will deliver on its pledges, including on reducing the workload of teachers by five hours, tensions in industrial relations will rumble on — and many inspiring, committed teachers may start losing hope they can continue to do their best by their pupils.

Now try this

I’m a big fan of statistics, and recall running a lunchtime club on it during my maths A-level (gulp). So I thank Nate Silver, the poker pro and political-forecasting expert, for making it cool! I reviewed his upcoming book on risk-takers for the FT this week — a captivating escapade into Las Vegas and prediction markets . . . In a recent interview Silver cited the influence of Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I learnt (via Charlie Warzel in the Atlantic) is also curiously big among artificial intelligence safety researchers.

Have a wonderful weekend.

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