Teachers are in the news, striking for better pay and working conditions. Whatever you think about the rights or wrongs of that—at the start of the action a slim majority of Brits supported it — it’s hard to ignore the country’s teacher workforce crisis. National Education Union (NEU) members have just rejected the government’s pay offer, triggering two further days of strikes.
This is as the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) has again highlighted high vacancy rates in schools. In the same week, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) invited research proposals on teacher recruitment and retention, a funding call that was supported by an evidence review conducted by the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research (CTTR) here at IOE. By the end of the week, the Commons Education Committee had opened an inquiry into teacher recruitment, training and retention, asking for evidence on the challenges and impact on pupils to be submitted in a short time-frame.
It is an issue of importance and urgency to us all in education, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers alike: there are not enough teachers in schools. But this isn’t obviously an issue of evidence. Each round of data publications brings little surprise in educational circles, while the challenges of teacher recruitment and retention have been well-evidenced and understood for some time.
