Teachers in the UK should be permitted to work from home to improve the recruitment and retention crisis in the profession, the Education Secretary has said.
Bridget Phillipson said all state school teachers should be allowed to work away from the classroom when marking, lesson planning and performing pupil assessment, the Observer reported.
It comes after figures published last month from a “working lives of teachers and leaders” survey showed 47% of participants were considering leaving the English state school sector because of a “lack of flexible working opportunities”.
That’s what this Government will do, by taking innovative examples from academies in offering more flexibility without reducing the teaching time with pupils
This was up from 34% in the 2023 survey.
Ms Phillipson told the Observer: “Children’s life chances suffer without world-class teachers in our classrooms – that’s why it’s never been more urgent that we grip the teacher recruitment and retention crisis raging in our schools.
“That’s what this Government will do, by taking innovative examples from academies in offering more flexibility without reducing the teaching time with pupils.
“Our new Children’s Wellbeing Bill will transform children’s life chances, helping us break the link between their background and what they can go on to achieve: that means driving up standards across every school.”
The Bill was introduced in the Commons earlier this month.
It makes teaching a bit less competitive because it can’t really offer that kind of work from home or flexible options
Warnings about teaching becoming less attractive over its limited opportunities to work from home were raised with the previous government last year.
Addressing the education select committee in November 2023, Philip Nye, a data scientist at the Institute for Government, said: “Teaching I think, historically, has been seen as quite family-friendly. You get the long summer break which if you have family responsibilities could be very useful.
“But now, perhaps compared to other non-public sector roles, it is not as flexible and family-friendly as it once was.”
While Dr Luke Sibieta, a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, highlighted to MPs that more employees in the private sector have been allowed to work from home since the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said: “It makes teaching a bit less competitive because it can’t really offer that kind of work from home or flexible options.”
