The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) has released its first annual report on Teacher Labour Market in England (external link). After the Department for Education (DfE) published its Teacher recruitment and retention strategy (external link), NFER responded with this report to “monitor the progress the school system is making towards meeting the teacher supply challenge over the next decade”. Drawing upon numerous sources of data on teaching recruitment and retention, the report aims to give policy makers and practitioners a good overview of the sector.
The report focuses on three key areas: the teacher labour market in England, teacher workload and the wider economic context. Overall, the key findings suggest that:
- secondary schools and early years providers are particularly struggling with recruitment and retention; with secondary schools facing a “supply challenge over the next decade” and data between 2012 and 2018 showing that early years providers are struggling to retain teachers;
- on average, 20% of teachers “feel tense about their job most or all of the time”, 7% higher than in other sectors, with over 40% also unhappy about the amount of recreational time they received outside of work.