In February 2011, when I addressed a conference on teacher training in London, I warned that the next teacher supply crisis would appear by 2014. The reasons I gave that day, to a frankly disbelieving audience, were based around three premises.
First, the government expected the private sector to lead the country into economic growth, and would hold down public-sector wages, making jobs in teaching look less financially attractive than working in the private sector. Both trends have come about.
Second, there was a perception at that time that we had enough teachers because school rolls were falling. That had been the case in much of the latter years of the Labour government but, as everyone knows, we are now in a period when pupil numbers, especially in London and the south-east, are rising sharply. However, I wasn’t to know that Michael Gove, when secretary of state for education, would sometimes be less than supportive of teachers and teaching as a career, going so far as to suggest that academies didn’t need to employ qualified teachers at all.
Third, the government muddied the waters over entry to the teaching profession, substituting for a clear policy of paying the tuition fees for all graduate trainee teachers a complicated, often changing bursary scheme that has proved difficult to sell, and required trainees to pay £9,000 in tuition fees. That compares badly with the Ministry of Defence, which pays a salary to Sandhurst officer cadets.
Furthermore, the Department for Education scrapped the well-understood graduate teacher training programme operated by schools and replaced it with the complex School Direct arrangements, which forced some universities to close their teacher-training courses. This resulted in a patchy distribution of training places that has not helped the supply of new teachers in some parts of England. The government has vacillated between wanting a free-market training system entirely run by schools and accepting some responsibility for the planning of future teacher numbers.
The end result of all this will, once again, be training courses starting this autumn with empty places. The worst problems are likely to be in subjects such as physics, design and technology, geography, business studies and even English. Only PE, history and languages are likely to be supplied with enough trained teachers for the 2016 job market. Without drastic action, more headteachers will be forced to employ staff not qualified in their subjects or for the age group they are teaching, or simply remove subjects from the curriculum.
Parents may find they need to rely more on private tutors when schools cannot guarantee the grades pupils will achieve. With the restrictions on tier 2 visa numbers [the most common route by which international students stay and work in the UK], and anxieties about migration, schools will also find it more difficult to recruit overseas teachers, other than from Europe. Schools are already importing teachers from Ireland.
The government has acknowledged that it faces a challenge, but not a crisis. Unless it recognises the scale of the problem and acts soon, it will become the worst teacher-supply situation since the dark days of the early 2000s. That is no way to create a world-class education system.
Professor John Howson is a former chief adviser to the government and a leading authority on teacher supply