Yesterday was World Teachers' Day, but these are tough times for those in the profession, not least school leaders. As we reported in June, teacher vacancies have been at historic highs since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and the last academic year, 2022/23, also saw unusually elevated levels of headteacher turnover. An important question is how much of this was simply due to an 'unwinding' of pandemic-era constraints, with teachers who had intended to switch schools or careers in 2020 or 2021 now belatedly able to make good on their plans, and how much reflects a sustained 'new normal' of rising teacher shortages and falling tenure.
It's now two-and-half years since the last nationwide lockdown in England, and September is high season for new headteacher appointments, so this brief post looks at the latest trends to examine whether we have now returned to something more like pre-pandemic norms. The short answer: not yet.
Figure 1 shows the number of new headteacher appointments each month over the last four academic years (green, blue, red and purple lines) and so far in 2023/24 (black line). Predictably, many more new appointments are made in September than in other months, with more modest termly peaks in January and April. The last pre-pandemic September was in 2019, after which numbers dropped dramatically in September 2020 (in between the early-2020 and early-2021 national lockdowns) before recovering somewhat in September 2021 and then overshooting hugely in September 2022. If we look at all years together again, we can see that September 2023 (black line) is lower than the massive 2022 peak, but still higher than pre-pandemic levels.
