Labour’s manifesto pledge to recruit 6,500 new expert teachers into shortage subjects may not be delivered until the end of this parliament, Schools Week understands.
The party earmarked £450 million, but still has not set out a timeline.
During an interview with Times Radio on Monday, education secretary Bridget Phillipson said there would be “progress over the course of the parliament because that is a rather large number of teachers…”
“But that was a day-one priority because I am clear the way that we drive up standards.”
Schools Week understands the Department for Education has assembled a specific team to hit the target.
One approach is to deliver over the five-year parliament and be ready to report its success before the next election.
It is also understood officials are considering whether the target will solely relate to recruitment of new teachers or whether it will also consider retention – which would reflect efforts to stop teachers leaving.
Jack Worth, the school workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research, previously urged Labour to “reframe” the target to be about recruitment and retention.
How Labour could use the £450m
Recent analysis modelled how Labour could use the £450 million on a combination of pay rises and financial incentives to boost teacher supply.
One option was to spend the full amount on a 3.3 per cent increase in teacher pay next year in an effort to reduce the supply gap by 4,000 by 2028. But just 600 would be “new” teachers, with retention accounting for the rest.
However, a lower pay rise (2.6 per cent), alongside £2,400 retention payments for teachers in their third year and boosting bursaries by £3,000 for most subjects, would slash the teacher gap by 7,000, although only 2,000 of these would be new appointees.
But David Spendlove, professor of education and associate dean of the faculty of humanities at the University of Manchester, said this would be “fiddling the figures”.
“I wouldn’t be impressed. It’s sleight-of-hand politics and the danger is they just simply adopt some of the bad practices of the previous government.”
Phillipson also announced in July that the Department for Education would “immediately resume and expand” its flagship teacher recruitment campaign, Every Lesson Shapes a Life.
But the DfE still hasn’t explained how this has been – or will be – done.
Spendlove said the 6,500 target was “always a misleading figure, always a distraction…something to appease the public”.
“Most of the public wouldn’t know what 6,500 meant, to many people it would sound like a large figure.
“To me, it was always a low target. It wasn’t a well-informed target and, consequently, it’s largely meaningless at the moment.”
‘Government, be more ambitious’
He called for a “more sustainable strategy to think about how they consistently recruit, retrain and develop teachers… what we need is a more sophisticated approach, not just a global figure”.
Sir Andrew Carter, the chief executive of the South Farnham Educational Trust, said any commitment to have more teachers was to be commended. “I know there’s no money, but the secret of teacher training is to get schools actively involved.
“We need more than that [6,500] and if it’s over five years it’s not even going to touch the sides. If all the providers were encouraged to have 5 per cent more we’d be there. If that was incentivised a little bit with some cash, that would be helpful.”
James Noble-Rogers, the executive director of the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers, said the government “should be more ambitious”.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Work is already underway to help deliver on our pledge to recruit 6,500 additional teachers across schools and colleges, including getting more teachers into shortage subjects, supporting areas that face recruitment challenges, and tackling retention issues.
“We are developing our approach and putting plans in place to achieve this, which we will share publicly in due course.”
