Teacher Labour Market in England Annual Report 2025
13 March 2025
NFER’s annual Teacher Labour Market report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, monitors the progress the education system in England is making towards meeting the teacher supply challenge by measuring the key indicators of teacher supply and working conditions.
This seventh annual report shows that June’s Spending Review is the Government’s last chance to enact the policy changes needed to hit its 6,500 new teacher manifesto pledge.
The scale of the challenge is clear. Recruitment into initial teacher training (ITT) remains persistently poor while teacher leaving rates have not significantly improved since the pandemic. Teacher shortages are having impacts on pupils. Data shows that the unfilled vacancy rate for teachers is six times higher than pre-pandemic, while secondary schools have come to rely more heavily on unqualified and non-specialist teachers, especially in schools with more deprived pupil intakes.
The Government should urgently address the teacher supply challenge, as policy action taken now will be crucial to meeting the 6,500 teacher recruitment target by the end of the parliament.
Key Findings
- Ninety per cent of teachers considering leaving teaching in 2023/24 cited high workload as a factor, and pupil behaviour has become one of the fastest-growing contributors to workload since the pandemic.
- Trainee recruitment for all except five secondary subjects was below the respective target in 2024/25 and NFER’s latest forecast for 2025/26 shows only five subjects have a reasonable chance of recruiting at or above target.Slight improvements to recruitment last year were limited to a few shortage subjects - such as biology and chemistry - driven mostly by higher bursaries.
- Increased reliance on unqualified and non-specialist teachers suggests teacher shortages are growing. The impacts of teacher shortages tend to be more acute in schools with a higher proportion of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.
- Last year’s 5.5 per cent pay rise, coupled with the previous Government’s introduction of £30,000 starting salaries, have returned starting salaries to 2010/11 levels in real terms.
- A lack of access to flexible working arrangements may be contributing to teachers leaving the profession.
- The national roll-out of the Early Career Framework (ECF) has had little impact on retention of early career teachers (ECTs).
- A key policy change in 2022/23, which expanded the list of countries whose teaching qualifications are recognised in England, has re-shaped the pool of international teachers entering the workforce. Countries added include Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Singapore and Ukraine. According to the research future policymaking should sustain this, as international recruitment can be a small, but important, part of new teacher supply.