PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Teachers: Recruitment and Retention - 12 June 2023 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

The school workforce census published last week shows that the number of teachers has increased by a further 2,800 this year. There are now more than 468,000 teachers in the state system in England. We have invested £181 million in recruitment this year, including training bursaries and scholarships worth up to £29,000, and we are delivering £30,000 starting salaries, reforming teacher training, delivering half a million training opportunities and working with the sector to address teacher workload and wellbeing.

The Minister mentions the data released last week, but it also highlights the unacceptable consequences of real-terms cuts to teachers’ pay and unmanageable workloads. It shows that posts without a teacher have more than doubled in the past two years. Last week, I met with NASUWT North East and the South Tyneside branch of the National Education Union, which raised concerns about the impact of the recruitment and retention crisis. When will the Minister take action to tackle this crisis by increasing teachers’ pay and reducing their workload?

In terms of teachers’ pay, we are waiting for the Government’s response. We have received and are looking at the School Teachers Review Body’s recommendations now, and we will respond in the normal way and on the normal timing. In terms of workload, we set up three important workload working groups, and over the years that has resulted in the working hours of teachers coming down by five hours a week, and we have pledged to do more to reduce that further.

There were 44,000 leavers from the teaching profession last year. That is 9.7% of the total workforce, and the leaver rate is the highest it has been since 2018. The Government have missed their secondary teacher recruitment targets every year for the past 10 years bar one. All that is yet more evidence of how the incompetent Conservative Government have created the recruitment and retention crisis among teachers, and schools in Slough and across our country are lamenting the detrimental impact on our children’s education. Minister, what are the Government doing to urgently fix the recruitment and retention crisis?

If the hon. Member looks at the tables attached to the school workforce census, he will see that we have returned to pre-pandemic levels of recruitment. If he looks over a period of years, he will see that the number of teachers coming into state-funded schools and the number leaving are broadly similar.

The abandonment of respectful address, such as “sir”, will not help, will it? Apparently it is because the female equivalent, “Miss”, is considered demeaning. Might I suggest the substitution of “ma’am”? It was good enough for Her late Majesty.

My right hon. Friend should not believe everything he reads in the newspapers. Behaviour in our schools is improving. We have set up behaviour hubs around the country to ensure that best practice is spread throughout the school system.

I call the shadow Minister.

As I said earlier, if the hon. Member were to look at the tables attached to the school workforce census, he would see that the number of teachers coming into the state sector and those leaving are broadly similar, and they have a broadly similar pattern across the years. For example, the number of teachers leaving last year—44,000—compares with the 42,500 who left the profession in 2010-11. The challenge we have faced over the last 13 or 14 years is that we have created an extra 1 million school places in our schools. However, over that period, the pupil-teacher ratio in secondary schools, particularly in the last few years, has been broadly similar—it has risen slightly, but it has been broadly similar—despite the fact that we have increased the number of school places by over 1 million.