Great teaching is the most powerful lever schools have to improve children’s education, according to the Education Endowment Foundation. So, how the education system recruits, trains, retains and supports teachers is one of the most important questions for politicians and policymakers – far more so than the structural reforms Westminster and Whitehall too often obsess over.
Yet schools in England have been facing a worsening teacher recruitment and retention crisis for over a decade, and pupil to teacher ratios have risen, particularly in secondary schools. Last year, the teaching workforce grew by fewer than 300 teachers. Too few teachers makes it harder for those in the profession to do their jobs well – further adding to workload and behaviour management pressures, and undermining retention even more. More than a million pupils are now in classes of more than 30. Shortages of teachers in several important specialist subjects at secondary school, including physics, computing and foreign languages mean that teachers without a relevant qualification are having to teach them, and some schools are having to limit subject provision.
