How to recruit 6,500 teachers? Modelling the potential routes to delivering Labour’s teacher supply pledge
04 December 2024
This research provides analysis showing how the Government could achieve its manifesto pledge of finding 6,500 additional teachers. The project, funded by the Gatsby Foundation, uses NFER’s forecasting and simulation model to compare the likely impacts and costs of different policies on teacher supply.
The report compares different potential scenarios using a range of policy levers such as increasing pay, increasing targeted financial measures (such as bursaries or retention payments) and improvements in non-financial factors such as workload.
The research suggests that reaching the target of 6,500 by 2027/28 will require a combination of different measures as each policy on its own (unless increased to unrealistic levels) does not deliver enough teachers. Targeted measures such as bursaries and early career retention payments are cost-effective as they focus resource on subjects with the largest shortages.
Key Findings
Under our working definition of the 6,500-teacher supply target, achieving it is ambitious and not trivial. Achieving the supply target will require new policy measures that are additional to business-as-usual and add to what is already enacted.
- Many of the policy measures we explore would not be sufficient to meet the supply target in isolation, unless they were taken to unrealistic extremes.
- Achieving the supply target through pay increases alone is feasible but would require pay increases of nearly ten per cent per year for two years. This scenario comes with the highest cost: £4.9bn per year from 2026/27 onwards.
- Scenarios with lower costs are those that either rely on cost-effective spending on targeted measures aimed at shortage subjects, particularly bursaries and early career retention payments, or on non-financial measures such as reducing workload or improving continuing professional development.
December 2024 Update
This report was updated in December 2024. The pay scenarios in our original analysis assumed teacher pay increases in 2027/28 as well as 2025/26 and 2026/27. However, it has since come to our attention that teacher pay increases in 2027/28 do not influence teacher supply in 2027/28 in the forecast and simulation model, due to a lagged impact.
To avoid implying that teacher pay increases in 2027/28 are necessary for meeting the teacher target, we have amended the scenarios to increase teacher pay in line with average earnings in 2027/28.
Amendments were made to Table 2, Tables 10-13, Figure 1 and the report text. The overall findings and conclusions are unaffected by this update.