In their BERA Blog post ‘Dropping off a cliff’ Innes et al. (2023) break down four areas of policy which they suggest are the ‘real driver’ of frighteningly low teacher training recruitment figures. The first two they identify are the early career framework (DfE, 2019) and the policy consequences of the initial teacher training (ITT) market review (DfE, 2022). While policy must play a large role in these recruitment figures, I suggest that it is not for the reasons outlined by Innes et al. in their post.
The early career framework (ECF) is significant for the sector, and for teachers currently working in schools, but I would argue that it has no bearing on decision-making for pre-service teachers and potential applicants to ITT programmes. Pre-service teachers are unlikely to encounter the ECF until they are working as a teacher in school. Innes et al. argue that the ECF has implications for significant workload increases for ECTs and they raise concerns that this would drive people out of teaching.
Yet, while large-scale surveys from Teacher Tapp found that ECTs agree with the authors in that there is too much overlap between the content of ITT and the ECF, more teachers reported the ECF would make them more likely to stay in teaching (25 per cent) than said it would make them less likely to stay (17 per cent) (Ford et al., 2022). There is certainly a conversation to be had about whether the ECF has an impact on teacher retention, but equating low teacher recruitment with the ECF seems to defy logic and demonstrates a poor understanding of the perspectives of pre-service teachers.
