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4 hours ago
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Teachers in England are abandoning the classroom over worsening pupil behaviour, stagnant pay and inflexible working practices, leaving vacancies at their highest rate on record, according to a report.
It warned that this month’s spending review was the government’s “last chance” to meet its manifesto pledge of hiring 6,500 additional teachers in state schools, as younger teachers continue to abandon the profession since the Covid pandemic and fewer graduates sign up as trainees.
More than six teaching posts in every 1,000 were left unfilled last year, according to the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER), double the vacancy rate recorded before the Covid pandemic in 2020 and six times higher than the NFER’s first measure of vacancies in 2010.
Jack Worth, the NFER’s school workforce expert and a co-author of the report, said: “Teacher recruitment and retention in England remain in a perilous state, posing a substantial risk to the quality of education.
“The time for half measures is over. Fully funded pay increases that make teacher pay more competitive are essential to keeping teachers in the classroom and attracting new recruits.”
The NFER said pupil behaviour was “one of the fastest-growing contributors to teacher workload” since the pandemic, and was likely to be linked to pupils’ mental health and challenges in supporting children with special educational needs.
“Teachers and [school] leaders’ perceptions of pupil behaviour in their school have worsened considerably since 2021-22, while the proportion of teachers who say they spend too much time responding to pupil behaviour incidents has increased substantially,” the report said.
It called for the government to develop “a new approach for supporting schools to improve pupil behaviour”, reinforced by improved support services and additional funding in the spending review, to retain more teachers.
Patrick Roach, the general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said: “This report underlines our calls for a national workforce plan to deliver a strategic approach to delivering the improvements needed to pay, workload, pupil behaviour and other working conditions which are essential to tackling the factors currently deterring graduates from choosing a career in teaching, and pushing existing teachers to leave the profession.”
A Department for Education (DfE) spokesperson said: “Recruiting and keeping great teachers in our classrooms is vital to improving life chances for all children. We are committed to resetting the relationship with the education workforce and working alongside them to re-establish teaching as an attractive, expert profession.
“Work has already begun, as part of our plan for change, to recruit an additional 6,500 expert teachers, including making £233m available next year to encourage more talented people into the classroom to teach subjects including maths, physics, chemistry and computing.
“On top of the 5.5% pay award announced last year, we are also taking steps to support teachers’ wellbeing and ease workload pressures including encouraging schools to allow their staff to work more flexibly so more teachers stay in the profession.”
The NFER reported that to cope with the shortages, class sizes were creeping higher, and more unqualified or non-specialist teachers were being used to plug gaps left in subjects such as physics.
The problems have been made worse by the DfE’s repeated failures to recruit enough trainee teachers. The NFER said that although last year’s 5.5% rise repaired pay levels to 2010’s in real terms, the DfE’s proposed 2.8% increase for 2025-26 was “a missed opportunity to make further gains” in recruitment.
Other reasons given for the exodus from the workforce included the profession’s inability to adopt some of the hybrid and flexible working arrangements introduced in other parts of the graduate labour market since the pandemic.
The NFER said school leaders could do more to adopt flexible working practices to improve teacher retention, however, such as greater provision for part-time working and allowing teachers to use their allocated planning, preparation and assessment time at home.
