For several years we have been gathering data about vacancies advertised on the websites of schools and colleges in England. The results have appeared in many analyses concerning school recruitment activity, including our joint annual reports with Teacher Tapp and The Gatsby Foundation, as well as occasional forays into roles such as technicians and other support staff.
This post extends the scope again by analysing in detail college recruitment activity in England between September 2018 (ie, about 18 months before the start of the pandemic) and the end of February 2024. It looks separately at further education (FE) colleges, sixth form colleges and university technical colleges (UTCs). Sincere thanks to The Gatsby Foundation for once again supporting this work.
For details of the methods used, see Footnote 1 and for a description of the taxonomies we developed and deployed to detect relevant positions, please refer to Footnote 2. As with our recent study of support and auxiliary staff in schools, but unlike our regular reports on teachers and technicians, this analysis applies our automated advert-identification system to our archive of web pages without checking each item manually, which would be impractical over such a large archive. The data are therefore very likely to include false positives (ie, mentions of positions outside the context of a recruitment advert) as well as false negatives (ie, failure to detect an advert, which is a potential error common to both approaches).
We expect these errors to be relatively small (where we have checked for them, false positives are typically in the range 10-15%) and to some extent they should also cancel each other out. But more to the point, as long as any biases are reasonably small and consistent, they still allow for analysis of changing recruitment activity over time even if the absolute values might overstate or understate the true numbers of adverts. Because we can't be certain that all of the items detected here correspond to adverts, they should be considered 'putative adverts', though for brevity we refer to them below simply as 'adverts'.
