Top officials from the Department for Education were questioned by MPs yesterday on progress towards Labour’s election pledge to recruit 6,500 new teachers.
Appearing in front of the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC), DfE permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood said work is underway on the target but no specific year has been set as a baseline against which to measure progress.
“We haven’t set a year as a baseline but we think it’s got to relate to this parliament and it’s got to mean something in natural language. In other words, it’s got to be 6,500 more than before you started,” Ms Acland-Hood told MPs.
“The detail of that is holding for the spending review. So there are a set of things here where we are working through the really fine detail linked to the delivery plans.”
Recruiting thousands of new teachers
In response, Helen Hayes, chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, who was sitting in on the PAC hearing, said: “It sounds like it’s underway but you don’t really know what it is.”
The spending review is due on 11 June and will be chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first multi-year spending plan - and the first from a Labour government since the 2000s.
A report by the National Audit Office last month warned it was not clear whether the government’s pledge would fully address staff shortages, and called for the DfE to publish a delivery plan.
The report also said the government has not explained how it decided on 6,500 as a target, or how these teachers will be split across different school types.
Delivery ‘is underway’
Asked how the 6,500 target was decided, Ms Acland-Hood said her understanding was that the target had been calculated by “looking at a range of different factors that represented some of the pressures on teacher numbers across schools and colleges”, including things like vacancy rates.
“I think the critical thing on the 6,500 is that delivery is already underway,” she added.
She said 2,000 more secondary school teachers started training this year compared with last year, and retention forecasts have been more favourable since the 5.5 per cent pay award last year.
The DfE budgeted to spend around £700 million on initiatives to address teacher shortages in secondary schools and further education colleges in 2024-25.
Asked why the DfE is not spending more of the £700 million on financial incentives for teachers, which have been shown to be effective in recruitment, Juliet Chua, director general for the Schools Group at the DfE, said the money is allocated to reflect a package of different interventions, including those that support teacher quality and workload and wellbeing.
Some £26 million is allocated towards marketing, including the DfE’s Get Into Teaching website and marketing campaigns.
Asked by one MP if the DfE is spending enough on marketing, Ms Acland-Hood said: “Always happy to have that conversation with the Treasury.”
Paternity leave ‘needs looking at’
Another MP asked how the DfE expects fathers-to-be to become teachers when they only get two weeks paid paternity leave in most schools.
“Shouldn’t we go further on paternity leave in schools to help the retention crisis of teachers?” he asked.
“I think it’s absolutely something we should be looking at. The challenge is this is governed by the , which is one of the pieces of the pay and conditions framework we don’t have a role in,” said Ms Acland-Hood.
“It’s for employers and the trade union side to discuss and negotiate.”
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