NFER dashboard highlights why teacher shortages are a key challenge facing Government’s opportunity mission

NFER has released a new version of our teacher recruitment and retention dashboard today.

The dashboard contains a huge amount of data about teachers in primary and secondary schools in England, including measures on teaching shortages, teachers leaving teaching, specialist teaching and teacher training. This data is broken down by geography across England, including by 2024 constituencies and teaching school hub areas, as well as by subject and school type.

Below, we use the dashboard’s data to explore the latest figures concerning teacher shortages in schools with more disadvantaged children.

The government has said it will focus on disadvantaged children as part of its mission to “break down barriers to opportunity.” Schools with a high level of disadvantage need excellent teachers to ensure all their students can access a high-quality education. The disadvantage gap (or ‘attainment gap’), which measures the difference in average attainment between disadvantaged students and their peers, widened dramatically over the course of the pandemic.

This followed a period of steady progress in closing it. Since the end of the pandemic, relatively little progress has been made in reversing the Covid-19 impact.

We consider what the latest data tells us about the gap between the least and most disadvantaged schools when it comes to teacher shortages. In the dashboard, we measure disadvantage by the percentage of pupils in each school who are eligible for free school meals (FSM).

We split schools into five groups, from least disadvantaged, with the lowest such rates, to the most disadvantaged, with the highest. We will look at how these groups compare on four key metrics related to teacher shortages.

Teacher shortages are consistently worse in disadvantaged schools, and the gap is getting wider compared to pre-pandemic trends

Teacher shortages are worse in schools with the most disadvantaged intakes and heading in the wrong direction. This is borne out in the latest data for secondary schools, as shown in Chart 1a. In the least disadvantaged schools in 2023/24, around 1 in 100 posts are either vacant or temporarily filled, compared to 2.6 in 100 posts in the most disadvantaged schools.

While shortages have always tended to be worse in disadvantaged schools, the data also suggests the gap between more and less disadvantaged schools is getting wider. Before the pandemic, in 2019/20, the gap between the least and most disadvantaged schools was relatively small.

The pandemic then led to a fall in teacher retention and an increase in recruitment, which led to shortages falling to low levels across secondary schools in 2020/21 and 2021/22. Since 2021, shortages have increased again, and the more disadvantaged schools have felt much larger increases than less disadvantaged schools. Data like this illustrates why DfE sees recruitment and retention as a major risk facing its goals to tackle disadvantage.

For primary schools in Chart 1b, teacher shortages are not as severe as they are for secondary schools, and the trends are different too. Primary school teacher shortages were declining already before the pandemic, in part because recruitment of primary school teachers was relatively strong.

Since the pandemic, there has been some sign of an increase in shortages but this is mainly in the more disadvantaged schools. As with secondary schools, there is some evidence the gap between the least and most disadvantaged schools in the primary sector is also widening; it is now at its widest since at least 2015/16.

The most disadvantaged schools have higher turnover rates, but this gap has not widened significantly over time

A possible reason that disadvantaged schools may have more shortages is turnover; teachers may be leaving these schools at a higher rate, creating more new vacancies. The most disadvantaged schools have the highest turnover rates and these rates have been accelerating since the end of the pandemic.

However, the acceleration has occurred across all schools, which suggests higher turnover is not necessarily a key factor driving the widening gap in teacher shortages between the least and most disadvantaged schools.

In Chart 2a, we can see turnover rates as of 2023/24 (measured between November 2022 and November 2023) in the secondary schools with the most disadvantaged intakes were around 22 per cent, meaning more than one in five teachers left these schools within a year.

In the least disadvantaged secondary schools, the turnover rate was around 14 per cent. However, as we can see in the chart, the gap between these lines has not changed hugely over time. We see a similar pattern in Chart 2b for primary schools, where turnover rates are more similar across the different groups of schools.

If increased turnover was driving the widening gap in teacher shortages that we saw earlier, we would expect the gap in turnover rates to also be widening. This does not appear to be the case. In turn, that suggests that the most disadvantaged schools’ difficulties in recruiting teachers to fill the vacancies left by others is probably a bigger driver of the widening gap in teacher shortages.

The shortage of specialist teachers is getting worse in key secondary subjects, and no more so than in the most disadvantaged schools

The NFER dashboard also contains data about the percentage of teaching in schools that is delivered by a teacher with a relevant qualification in that subject. Chart 3 shows how these rates have changed for maths, English and science subjects in state secondary schools, for the most and least disadvantaged schools. As the chart suggests, these rates are slowly declining over time at the overall national level.

Chart 3 also shows that the rate of specialist teaching is lower in the most disadvantaged schools. This is true in all three subjects featured here, and is particularly true for Maths. In 2023/24, 79 per cent of teaching in the least disadvantaged schools was taught by a teacher with a relevant qualification. For the most disadvantaged schools, the rate was 67 per cent.

As with teacher shortages in secondary schools, we also see evidence here that the gap between the least and most disadvantaged schools is widening. While all schools have (on average) seen a decline in specialist teaching between 2015/16, this decline in the most disadvantaged schools has been larger than the decline in the least disadvantaged.

One policy successive governments have pursued to tackle this issue is targeted incentive payments, which are only paid to teachers of specific subjects working in high-need areas. While some evidence suggests similar payments do aid retention, the statistics above suggest existing policies have not yet put the decline in specialist teaching into reverse. NFER will publish an evaluation of these payments in 2025.

Disadvantaged schools spend more money on supply staff than other schools, and the sums are increasing rapidly

A key policy to tackle disadvantage in schools in recent years has been the pupil premium, an annual payment aimed at improving educational outcomes in these schools.

School leaders receive money for every eligible pupil (including eligible for FSM, as well as those in care) and are encouraged to spend that money on interventions that will drive ‘maximum impact’, including high-quality teaching of English and maths, targeted tutoring support and attendance strategies.

The latest data from our dashboard suggests teaching shortages are placing additional financial pressures on the most disadvantaged schools. This risks reducing their available budget for high-impact interventions.

Per-pupil spending on supply teaching had been on a gradual decline since at least 2015, and reached a low point in the 2020/21 financial year. This is probably due to relatively low shortages over the period and reduced demand for in-person teaching during the first year of the pandemic.

In Chart 4, we show how per-pupil spend on supply teaching has increased since the pre-pandemic level and how this has varied by disadvantage. Average spend on supply staff has increased markedly across primary and secondary schools, irrespective of their level of disadvantage. (Whilst the data is not adjusted for changes in the price level over time, the growth in spending easily outstrips inflation over this period).

In addition, the most disadvantaged schools spend considerably more than other schools on supply teachers. In the latest data, the most disadvantaged secondary schools are spending 150 per cent more, in per pupil terms, than the least disadvantaged schools. These patterns largely correlate with the increased shortages in teachers across the same period we saw earlier.

Conclusions

The data presented in NFER’s updated teacher recruitment and retention dashboard points to a widening teacher shortage gap between schools based on their level of disadvantage. Teacher shortages have historically been worse in the most disadvantaged schools and there is evidence that they are accelerating faster.

Specialist teaching is down in key subjects across all schools on average, but no more so than in the most disadvantaged schools. Schools receive pupil premium funding to tackle the educational impact of disadvantage.

However, data suggests disadvantaged schools face additional financial pressures too, with the most disadvantaged secondary schools spending twice as much per pupil on supply teaching than the least disadvantaged.

The disadvantage gap is considerably above pre-pandemic levels and not closing. Tackling these workforce gaps is an important part of any policy response to make progress on the government’s opportunity mission.

You can explore issues like this one further by looking at all the metrics and local data in our updated teacher recruitment and retention data dashboard.

This project has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation. 

This work was undertaken in the Office for National Statistics Secure Research Service using data from ONS and other owners and does not imply the endorsement of the ONS or other data owners.