Experts have called for new guidance to fix gaps in data on disabled staff, with schools lacking information for most teachers despite annual workforce censuses.
New research warns of a “lack of awareness” among schools that they need to “complete data from a diversity and inclusion perspective” – and recommends the Department for Education communicate this.
The qualitative study is only based on interviews with 20 school and council staff, but was commissioned by the DfE itself to understand barriers to collecting data.
It comes after the most recently published national staff census showed schools had not obtained disability data for 53 per cent of teachers. The DfE then left disability out of its analysis of staff characteristics – looking only at gender, ethnicity and age instead – due to the “large amount of missing data”.
