Government plans to recruit 6,500 new teachers would require a
teacher pay increase of nearly 10 per cent a year for three
consecutive years, if using pay as a sole incentive.
New NFER analysis suggests that this would cost an additional
£2.1 billion next year (2025/26), rising to £4.9 billion in
2026/27 and £7.7 billion from 2027/28 onwards.
The report highlights the potential for alternative lower cost
options which either rely on cost-effective spending on targeted
measures aimed at shortage subjects, particularly bursaries and
early career retention payments (ECRPs), or on non-financial
measures such as reducing workload or improving Continuing
Professional Development (CPD).
The 2024 Labour party manifesto pledged to ‘recruit 6,500 new
expert teachers in key subjects', but without setting out a
detailed definition of how this supply target would be measured
or delivered. The Education Secretary has since committed to
deliver the recruitment target over the course of the five-year
parliament.
The report, How to recruit 6,500
teachers? Modelling the potential routes to deliver Labour's
teacher supply pledge, provides detailed analysis of
some of the potential policy choices available to the Government,
with estimated costs.
The analysis, funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation,
explores the role of financial policy levers, such as pay,
bursaries and ECRPs, and non-financial measures, such as workload
reduction, in meeting the teacher supply target.
According to the research, targeted measures aimed at shortage
subjects, such as physics, could include an expanded set of
retention payments that are available to a wider set of teachers.
For example, these payments could be made available to teachers
of shortage subjects in all secondary schools and/or those with
more than five years' experience.
Achieving the supply target through pay increases alone would
require a pay increase of 9.55 per cent per year in each of the
three years from 2025/26 to 2027/28. By 2027/28, such a pay
increase would restore the relative position of teachers' pay
within the country's earnings distribution that it had in 2010.
However, the analysis estimates the pay increase would cost the
Government £7.7 billion pounds per year from 2027/28 and beyond
to finance. The research suggests the current tight financial
environment makes it unlikely these measures will form a
significant part of an overall strategy.
The research goes on to say the recruitment target is also
unlikely to be met without new policy action and that many
current policy measures would not be sufficient to meet the
supply target in isolation.
Bursary increases alone would not be able to attract enough
trainees to provide 6,500 additional teachers unless levels were
raised above starting salaries. ECRPs and broader retention
payments could be used, but increasing the value of targeted
bursaries and ECRPs could create large disparities in pay between
subjects.
The report recommends the Government publishes a comprehensive
strategy for how it defines and plans to meet the target, and how
it will be funded.
Jack Worth, School Workforce Lead at the NFER and
co-author of the report, said:
“The Government faces a considerable challenge to meet its 6,500
teacher supply pledge and many choices about how to deliver it.
“Our analysis shows that substantially increasing teachers' pay
could possibly deliver the required number of teachers, but it
comes at a very high cost that is unlikely to be feasible in the
current fiscal environment.
“Achieving the supply target will require new policy measures.
“We wait with interest to get clarity from the Government on how
the target will be defined and how it plans to deliver and fund
it.”
Jenni French, Head of STEM in
Schools at Gatsby Charitable Foundation, said:
“The shortage of new teachers coming into the profession
continues to be a barrier to delivery of the high-quality
education our children and young people deserve, and the skills
boost we need to deliver sustainable economic growth.
“We welcome ambitious policy commitments on teacher
recruitment from the new Government, and this opportunity to
overlay the insights from NFER's modelling, as part of Gatsby's
ongoing research into teacher retention and recruitment, so that
the government has as much information as possible to ensure that
its targets are achievable.”
The study also looks at whether non-financial policy levers could
potentially impact the recruitment target. Evidence suggests
reducing teachers' working hours by five hours per week would not
be sufficient on its own to improve retention to meet the target.
In addition, reintroducing funded national Continuing
Professional Development (CPD) programmes would not, in
isolation, be enough to meet the target.
However, the quantifiable evidence on these measures is weak and
limited, so the research also recommends the Government invests
in deepening the evidence base of interventions that can improve
teacher recruitment and retention.
