The Current Teacher Shortage Set to Be One of the Main Challenges for the UK in 2023

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In Rishi Sunak’s first speech of 2023, he declared that “improving education is the closest thing to a silver bullet there is”, adding that state schools are “empowered by reform”.

However, with teachers’ strikes looming in February and March, and endemic teacher shortages, worsened by the Covid pandemic, it is questionable as to whether the Prime Minister’s words are conviction or reality. 

The upcoming strikes are symbolic of teacher dissatisfaction and unhappiness over pay and working conditions. The figures relating to teacher recruitment paint part of this picture. 

At the end of 2022, recruitment for secondary school teachers was 41% below target, for the ninth time in ten years, with recruitment for some subjects such as Physics being 83% below target. 

In terms of retention, 40% of newly qualified teachers leave the profession within five years, and 22% of teachers aged 50 or younger want to leave the profession within the next five years. 

In 2019, the then-education secretary, Damian Hinds, introduced the Teacher Recruitment and Retention strategy, however, it does not appear, that there has been any marked improvement following the change of five education secretaries in three years. 

For the current academic year, the Department for Education (DfE) introduced a pay increase for teachers, with a 5% rise for experienced teachers and leaders, and an 8.9% increase for Early Career Teachers outside of London. 

This move was heavily criticised by Dr Patrick Roach, National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) general secretary, who claimed that it was “an insult with inflation running in the double digits and following a decade of real-term pay cuts to teachers’ salaries”, thus suggesting that there is still mass dissatisfaction with pay. 

In a world where education is seen as the global standard for success and social mobility, it is difficult to decipher whether policy responses, and strike mediation will solve the endemic of teacher shortages, or whether a pedagogical shift is needed.