Exploring the special schools workforce: What’s the current picture?

Special schools are a vital part of the education landscape in England, but relatively limited research has been done on the workforce in these schools. In this two-part blog series we seek to start filling this gap ^[1]. In this blog, we look at the workforce in state-funded special schools, teacher vacancy rates and data about teachers with qualified teacher status (QTS). The next piece will seek to understand teacher recruitment and retention in these schools by looking at the dynamics of the teacher workforce over the last five years. We conclude each blog with some recommendations that can improve our understanding of those issues and help workforce challenges in special schools.

Special schools have more staff than primary schools, especially teaching assistants

On average, special schools have fewer pupils than primary schools ^[2] but considerably more staff. The average special school has around 75 staff (measured in full-time equivalent rates), compared to a primary school with 30.

While special schools have more teachers than primary schools, most of the difference in workforce size is explained by the number of teaching assistants. Special schools have around 41 teaching assistants on average, which is considerably more than both the average primary (11) and secondary school (14). A recent DfE survey found teaching assistants in mainstream schools most commonly work with pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), so it is unsurprising that special schools will employ more teaching assistants. Indeed, almost all pupils in special schools have an education, health and care plan (see here). Nonetheless, the difference here is large and has important repercussions for how special schools manage their workforce.

Teaching assistants are widely used across all special schools. In this research, we have gone beyond looking at all special schools together and attempted to understand how workforces may vary across special schools according to the needs of the children they serve. To do this, we have split special schools into five types, based on the types of special educational needs of the children they educate, as listed in the chart above. This approach will have limitations, which we have outlined in the appendix.

Schools specialising in Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) needs tend to have fewer staff and (proportionally) fewer teaching assistants, but the data suggests this is because these schools have fewer pupils than other special schools. We did not find large differences between special schools across the country in this data.

It is not surprising that there are more members of staff per pupil (and teachers) in special schools compared to both state primary and secondary schools. On average, special schools have one member of staff for every two children, compared to average ratios of 1:11 and 1:12 in primary and secondary schools. In some types of special school, these ratios are even lower, which emphasises both the demands and costs of providing education to pupils with SEND in a specialist setting.

Special schools are likely to be particularly affected by teaching assistant shortages, although these are hard to measure given existing data

The reliance of special schools on teaching assistants means it is harder to assess the health of workforce recruitment and retention in special schools than it is for mainstream schools. For example, DfE does not collect or publish vacancy rates for teaching assistants like it does for teachers.

Existing evidence suggests teaching assistant shortages are acute across England, and this particularly impacts special schools. In a cost-of-living survey in 2023, NFER found that 63 per cent of senior leaders from special schools reported finding the recruitment of teaching assistants “very difficult”, compared to 51 per cent and 55 per cent in primary and secondary schools, respectively. Special schools also reported substantially less success in filling all their teaching assistant posts within two months, presumably in part due to the sheer number of posts they need to fill. Respondents also highlighted the challenge of recruiting teaching assistants with skills to meet the specific needs of pupils with special educational needs.

In the same survey, school leaders tended to say that salaries were the ‘biggest barrier’ to recruiting teaching assistants: 45 per cent of special school leaders said this.

Teaching assistant pay is low relative to UK averages and relative to jobs requiring similar levels of skills and offer more flexibility - making it difficult for special schools to recruit enough staff. Recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows the average, full time teaching assistant earned around £20,600 in the UK (as of April 2024) ^[3]. Full-time jobs in the same wider occupation category, Caring and Leisure Services, a reflection of those with a similar level of skills and qualifications, earned £25,760. (For all full-time jobs, the average was £37,430).

Given that special schools rely on teaching assistants to a far larger degree than other schools, DfE should start measuring teaching assistant vacancy rates in schools as part of the annual school workforce census ^[4]. This is a crucial step in helping understand the national shortage of teaching assistants and scale of the policy solutions, including on pay, that are required to help. It is also likely to be more important to mainstream schools in future too, given the increased numbers of children with SEND in those settings.

Special schools are vulnerable to funding pressures when the government provides additional funding for pay rises for teachers, but not support staff

The prevalence of teaching assistants in special schools also causes financial pressures for schools when pay is increased ^[5]. Teaching assistants’ salaries determine the overall state of special schools’ finances more so than they do other school types. This is borne out in the 2023/24 school expenditure statistics ^[6], which show that spending on education support staff makes up 33 per cent of all spending in special schools, compared to 19 per cent across all schools.

The government has not always announced additional funding for schools when teaching assistants have received pay increases ^[7]. This risks putting pressure on all schools, but special schools are particularly vulnerable because a larger proportion of their budget is determined by teacher assistant pay. The latest increase in funding linked to an increase in teacher pay did also provide additional funding (to the average school) for support staff (here and here). This arrangement should continue in future to ensure special schools do not experience additional funding pressures linked to pay increases.

Vacancy statistics for special schools and AP settings are combined in DfE reporting. Special schools face more severe shortages than the average school, but the worst shortages are concentrated in AP settings

Previous reporting on teacher shortages in special schools has emphasised the higher teacher vacancy rate in published statistics for “State-funded special and PRU” schools compared to most other school types. In the latest statistics, there were 0.8 vacancies per 100 teacher posts for this group, compared to 0.6 across all state schools. ^[8]

A closer look at the school-level data for 2023/24 shows us that special schools have a substantially lower rate of teacher vacancies, on average, than Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) and other forms of alternative provision (AP). Indeed, the average vacancy rate is twice as high as in these settings (1.4 per 100 posts) than it is in special schools (0.7 per 100 posts). Whilst this does not mean the vacancy rate in special schools is low (it is similar to secondary schools, where recruitment has been challenging in recent years), the statistics appear to overstate special school vacancies and understate AP vacancies by grouping these schools together.

DfE also releases data about the number of teaching posts that are temporarily filled. In 2023/24, around 1.1 per cent of all teaching roles in special schools were temporarily filled. This is substantially higher than the rate in primary schools (0.6 per cent) and higher than in secondary schools (0.9 per cent), but it is only around half the rate found in AP settings (two per cent). On average, special schools’ teacher shortages appear to be worse than primary schools, but not as bad as AP settings.

We also looked at how the data differs across different types of special school, as defined above. The data suggests special schools with a high proportion of pupils with SEMH have much higher teacher vacancy rates than all other schools, at nearly the same level as in AP. More teaching roles were temporarily filled in these schools too. Schools that specialise in Sensory and/or Physical Needs had low rates of vacancies and temporarily-filled posts, although there are relatively few schools in this category.

We also found some evidence of a geographical component to teacher shortages in special schools. In particular, special schools in the East of England have comparatively high vacancy rates and those in London use temporary staff more often than others. Generally, shortages appear more acute in the south of the country. To some extent, areas with greater shortages of special school teachers are those areas with shortages generally. For example, all state-funded schools in London use temporary staff, on average, more than the national average. On the other hand, vacancies are not as comparatively high in all state-funded schools in the East of England, as they are in special schools there.

Special school teachers are less likely to have Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). This may suggest special schools are more willing to use a wider pool of candidates when recruiting teachers

Qualified teacher status (QTS) is a legal requirement to teach in many English schools and is considered desirable for teachers in the majority of schools in England. DfE’s data suggests that around two to three per cent of teachers in primary and secondary schools do not have QTS. By contrast, around 10 per cent of teachers in special schools do not have QTS and in AP, 11 per cent do not.

Little work has been done to explain these differences. Existing regulations state all schools can recruit teachers with “special qualifications or experience” where no suitable qualified teacher is available, which could apply to special schools more often. Statistics suggest that ‘special and PRU academies’ have a higher rate of teachers without QTS than their Local Authority maintained equivalents ^[9]. This might reflect the fact that academies (and free schools) have additional flexibility to recruit teachers without QTS, and special academies use this flexibility more than mainstream academies. At the time of writing, the Government is seeking to reduce academy freedoms to recruit teachers without QTS in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.  

We see some correlation between the areas where special schools face larger staffing challenges and use of teaching staff without QTS. For example, use of staff without QTS in special schools is highest in the East of England and London, areas where special schools appear to have greater teacher shortages (as measured by vacancy and temporary staff rates above). The same is true for special schools which specialise in SEMH. These correlations could suggest special schools with staff shortages are more likely to widen their search criteria to consider candidates without QTS when recruiting teachers. Indeed, special school vacancy rates may be reduced by the recruitment of teachers without QTS. However, given that the vacancy rate in special and secondary schools was similar in the most recent data, teacher shortages do not appear to wholly explain the gap in QTS rates. 

It is unclear to what extent, if any, these differences represent a problem, although it stands to reason that unqualified teachers, on average, may provide lower quality teaching. Extensive evidence links ‘high quality teaching’ to better pupil outcomes, but there are no studies (to our knowledge) of the effect of teachers having QTS on their pupils’ outcomes, particularly in the context of special schools in the UK. We also did not look at what qualifications these teachers do have. It is therefore difficult to precisely describe the effects a shortage of teachers with QTS will be having on pupils in special schools (and AP settings). Nonetheless, given the value successive governments (including the current one) have placed on the standards encoded in the QTS, this disparity should be monitored and evaluated by policymakers, particularly where it is linked to teacher shortages.

Conclusions and Recommendations

In this blog, we have highlighted some of the major differences between the special schools’ workforce and the workforce in other school types. We emphasised the role of teaching assistants and the need for better data on them to properly understand special schools’ recruitment challenges. We also examined the data on teacher vacancy rates and highlighted a difference in the percentage of teachers with QTS.

We recommend that:

• DfE starts measuring teaching assistant vacancy rates. Give the criticality of teaching assistants to special schools, not doing so makes it difficult to fully assess the workforce challenge facing special schools.
• Special schools should always be fully funded to increase support staff pay. Funding allocations that only fund pay increases for teachers (and not support staff) will particularly disadvantage special schools and AP settings, who spend a higher proportion of their budgets on support staff.
• DfE should separate out special schools and alternative provision in school workforce statistics. The existing statistics conflate these settings in a way that masks differences between them.
• Work is done to understand why around 10 per cent of teachers in special schools do not have QTS, compared to the national average of three per cent, and remedies are implemented where this is driven by shortages in teachers with QTS.

In our second blog on the special schools’ workforce, we will look in more detail at the dynamics of the teacher workforce: how quickly teachers leave special schools and those who join special schools, including through initial teacher training.

This project has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation. Visit nuffieldfoundation.org. Thanks to all those who reviewed these blogs and offered helpful comments before publication, and to NFER staff for helping prepare the data.

Appendix: Data

In these blogs, we wanted to explore how workforce challenges vary depending on the type of SEND needs each school serves. We used statistics about the needs of pupils at each school to construct this classification. We treated a special school as ‘specialising’ in a type of need if more than 50 per cent of pupils had a primary need of that type. Some schools did not have a single type of need that met this definition. Indeed, many special schools serve pupils with different ‘primary need’ types, even if more than half their pupils have one of the types of needs listed here. As such, this typology clearly has limitations. It adds to our understanding of workforce issues in special schools, but further work is needed to develop typologies like this one to improve analysis of special schools in England.

The breakdown by type in our data is here:

References

[1] The school workforce census, the annual data collection about teachers and other school staff, is completed by all state-funded special schools, including both maintained schools and academies. Independent special schools and non-maintained special schools (a specific type of special schools, not to be confused with academies) do not fill in this census. These school types are therefore not included in this analysis although some of the findings here may still be useful to these schools. We refer to the schools that do fill in the workforce census as ‘Special schools’ throughout.

[2] In the latest pupil number statistics (January 2024), the average number of pupils (headcount) at state-funded special schools was 150. At primary schools, it was 275. At secondary schools, it was around 1,060 (including those in Key Stage 5). At Alternative Provision settings (including pupil referral units), it was just under 50 pupils. Special schools will cater to a variety of ages, but many are all-through. AP tends to be focused on secondary-age pupils.  

[3] Median annual pay, full-time, gross.

[4] Additional improvements to data collection could help improve the evidence base on support staff too, such as linking individuals between different waves of the workforce census (as is possible with teachers).

[5] Unlike teacher pay, teaching assistant pay is not set by DfE. The National Education Union says most educational support staff, which will include teaching assistants, are employed on local government pay bands. These bands are set by the National Joint Council for Local Government Services. More information here.

[6] These statistics cover maintained schools and not academies, but we would not expect academies spending to diverge markedly from these trends.

[7] For example, DfE said it had funded the 2023/24 teacher pay increases but did not say the same about support staff increases. It should be noted that ‘affordability’ here is calculated using averages; schools with existing deficits can still face added financial pressure as wages are increased, even with additional funding.

[8] These statistics are high-level. They would not necessarily capture a lack of teachers with specific skills or experience. See later discussion about qualified teacher status.

[9] In the latest school workforce statistics, 2023/24, 11.4% of teachers (by FTE) in ‘Special and PRU academies’ did not have QTS. For ‘LA maintained special or PRU’, the equivalent figure was 7.6%.