Teaching in the UK is in trouble. Less than half the number of secondary school teachers required this year, a record low, have been recruited, according to government figures released last week. STEM (science, engineering, technology and maths) subjects are particularly struggling: we only have 17 per cent of our target number of physics teachers and 63 per cent of maths teachers (down from 88 per cent last year). Yet this is a problem across the curriculum: the only subjects where the government met its targets were classics, PE and history.
Teach First, the largest teacher training programme in the UK, announced this weekend that in order to tackle this recruitment crisis it will consider being part of a new apprenticeship scheme for trainees as young as 18. The idea is that these trainee teachers would pay no tuition fees and earn a salary as they worked, thereby hopefully attracting school-leavers who are put off by the cost of a degree. Teach First itself has been struggling in recent years: last year it recruited the lowest number of trainees in four years, missing its target by one-fifth.
Having teachers and students who are potentially only a few months apart in age is a very strange relationship dynamic
There are obvious safeguarding issues with this proposal: having teachers and students who are potentially only a few months apart in age is a very strange relationship dynamic. I remember when I first started teaching, aged 21, that I thought my relative youth would make it easier for me to build relationships with the students. To some extent this was true, yet it also made it harder for me to exert authority. My relative lack of life experience did not help matters either.
Teaching apprenticeships could also erode the status of the profession even further. Teachers should be, fundamentally, subject specialists, not teenagers who have had no further education than the one they are instructing. Having a degree, for all of its financial downsides, gives you a lot of weight in the classroom, and students are much more likely to look to you for expertise – and to see you as an aspirational figure – if you have been to a good university yourself. The ever-widening roles teachers take on, particularly in terms of pastoral responsibilities, means that the importance of subject knowledge has been sidelined for other skills, but surely we need to re-establish teaching as a more academic profession, not less? We already have lower entry requirements than many other OECD countries: for example, in Finland, France, Portugal and Spain, graduates need a masters degree in the relevant subject to become a secondary school teacher, whereas in the UK 22 per cent of maths teachers and 43 per cent of physics teachers have no relevant post A-level qualification.
The other fundamental problem is that this will do nothing to help retention. The largest workforce survey by the Department for Education found that 40,000 teachers resigned from state schools last year, while the number of teaching vacancies have doubled in the last two years. Shockingly, 40 per cent of teachers leave within five years of qualifying. Teach First also has a particularly high turnover: only 69 per cent of Teach First teachers continue for more than one year after qualifying (compared to 88 per cent who train through other routes). The government is therefore literally paying hundreds of millions to train up staff who will simply not stay. Why should we assume the same thing won’t happen with apprenticeship teachers?
There are many reasons for this mass exodus: poor behaviour in schools, the pressures of Ofsted, other careers being able to offer more flexible, family-friendly arrangements like working from home. Ultimately though, the two main factors are pay and workload. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, salaries for more experienced teachers have fallen by 13 per cent in real terms since 2010. Graduates in STEM subjects can command much higher salaries in the private sector, and so are particularly hard to recruit and retain: in the early 2010s, maths teachers accounted for nearly 30 per cent of its secondary cohort, but this declined to 18 per cent by 2018. Unless we can address this, then we will continue to experience a brain drain of the best and brightest into other professions.
If we can’t give teachers more money, then we could potentially give them more time. Due to increasing pupil numbers and decreasing staff levels, teacher timetables in most schools are made up of 90 per cent teaching time and 10 per cent PPA (planning, preparation and assessment time). We need to ease some of these pressures and allow for more good old-fashioned thinking space. This might, ironically, mean recruiting more teachers: at an extreme end, allowing for 50 per cent PPA would require about a third more teachers coming into the system. Yet if this increased quality, standards and job satisfaction, then it would also increase recruitment and retention. This would be a long-term investment; apprentice teachers, on the other hand, are a short-term band-aid.
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