Theme 4: Teacher supply, recruitment, retention and promotion

Urgent and coordinated action is needed to fully understand what the barriers to teaching being viewed as a valuable and attractive profession are. These include (but are not limited to): the causes and effects of an unmanageable workload; how a negative workplace culture affects wellbeing; a lack of flexible working models; the impact of inspection practices on morale; and the compounding effect of learners requiring additional support and cuts to education and children’s services.

Many factors cross into areas beyond our statutory role, highlighting that the system needs to work together to understand and define what the issues are, and the action required to meet them. It is essential that any work on teacher recruitment, retention and promotion incorporates the work led by the national anti-racist education programme, ensuring a diverse profession that better represents our communities. We can also learn from international education systems that have comparatively better teacher recruitment and retention rates

4.1 We call for a coordinated, collaborative and outward-looking approach to defining and then removing the barriers to teaching being viewed as a valuable and attractive profession.

4.2 We call for deeper efforts to collect, gather and connect data across stakeholders to better understand current and future teacher supply requirements.