The residual impact of educational disruption on primary school attainment by spring 2022

30th June 2022 by Timo Hannay [link]

Update 1st July 2022: See also this coverage from TES.

We're delighted to be continuing our collaboration with Hodder Education – this time with generous support from the Nuffield Foundation – to monitor the aftereffects of school closures on pupil attainment at primary schools in England.

Our latest report, released today, provides the most up-to-date analysis currently available, using data up to and including the 2022 spring term. To summarise some of the main findings:

• There are still sizeable attainment shortfalls across all year groups in grammar, punctuation and spelling
• Attainment in reading for Year 3-6 pupils had returned almost to pre-pandemic levels
• Reading in Years 1 and 2 has been particularly negatively impacted by school closures and pupils in these years are still behind pre-pandemic attainment levels
• The gaps between disadvantaged pupils and their peers were smaller in spring 2022 compared to spring 2021. The difference between the attainment of pupils eligible for the Pupil Premium and the attainment of their peers (the disadvantage gap) still appears to be larger than it was pre-pandemic, in reading and GPS
• All English regions showed improved attainment between spring 2021 and spring 2022, but were nevertheless differently affected. For example, Year 1 and 2 pupils attending schools in the North showed the least improvement in reading. Pupils across all primary school years (Years 1-6) in the Midlands showed lower average improvement in maths than their peers in other regions

To find out more, we encourage you to read the full report.

As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions: [email protected]

Teacher recruitment after the COVID-19 pandemic

20th June 2022 by Timo Hannay [link]

Update 2nd August 2022: See our end-of-year update, which shows even bigger increases in recruitment activity. We've also switched the colours in Figure 5 to match those in Figure 2.

Update 20th June 2022: See also this blog post by our collaborators at Teacher Tapp and this coverage from TES.

Since April 2020, we have been reporting on the profound effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on school recruiting. In June 2020 and again in October 2021, we collaborated with the Gatsby Foundation and Teacher Tapp to analyse these unprecedented disruptions in depth. Our approach used a powerful combination of SchoolDash's vacancies data (gathered nightly from school websites) and Teacher Tapp's insights into the opinions and intentions of teachers and school leaders (derived from their unique online surveys).

Now is a good time to revisit this critical topic: Most COVID restrictions in England have been lifted and schools are, on the whole, fully open again. Moreover, we're coming to the end of the traditional peak teacher recruiting season – the first since the end of lockdown. If there is to be a 'new normal', this may be our first glimpse of it.

We're therefore delighted to be collaborating again with Gatsby and Teacher Tapp. Our joint report, Teacher Recruitment, Job Attachment and Career Intentions after the COVID-19 Pandemic is published today. To see an executive summary and the full results, we encourage you to read the report. But for the insatiably curious, this supplementary blog post provides some deeper analysis of the vacancies data using the very latest information – up to and including last Friday, 17th June 2022.

Teacher ads up

Page 3 of our joint report includes a graph that compares this year's teacher recruiting activity with previous years, both immediately before and during the pandemic. Figure 1 shows similar data, but broken down by subject and with results from the last two weeks added. (All data were gathered using an automatic process that visits school websites every night and extracts information about any new vacancies it finds there¹.)

2018-2019 (green line) was the last full year before the pandemic. 2019-2020 (blue; the year during which COVID-19 struck) showed considerably lower levels of advertising during what's normally the peak season from March to May. 2020-2021 (red; the second year of the pandemic) was subdued throughout, albeit with a slight recovery in the spring. However, this year, 2021-2022 (purple), has been buoyant, not just compared to the pandemic years but also compared to the last pre-pandemic year. (See all years together again.) Note in particular the huge rebound in early June 2022, following the half-term break and jubilee bank holidays. The result is that teacher recruiting activity is continuing at a high level during a time of year when it would normally be falling much more rapidly.

These weekly data provide a clear view of the seasonality – and disruptions to it – but year-on-year changes are most clearly seen by viewing cumulative data instead. It is also interesting to see differences by subject. So far this year, English and Mathematics have barely returned to pre-pandemic levels (compare the purple line with the green one). In contrast, Science is slightly ahead, while Arts, Languages, Humanities and Technology are far above normal levels.

(Use the menus below to view weekly or cumulative data, and to select different subject areas. Click on the figure legend to hide or view individual academic years. Hover over the lines to see corresponding data values.)

Figure 2 summarises the changes seen so far this year compared to last year (red columns) and compared to the most recent pre-pandemic year (blue). Looking again at both years together, all subjects showed very large year-on-year increases in the range 40%-60%, but in some cases this meant no more than a return in to pre-pandemic levels whilst in other cases it resulted in a net gain of 30% or more.

In terms of numbers of adverts, Science and Languages showed the largest year-on-year increases (red), while Humanities and Technology showed the largest increases since before the pandemic (blue). In total, there are so far over 12,000 more adverts than the during the same period last year and nearly 5,000 more than in the most recent year before the pandemic.

(Use the menu below to switch between changes in percentage terms and in terms of numbers of adverts. Hover over the columns to see corresponding data values and numbers of advertisements.)

Figure 3 shows the percentage change in numbers of adverts between 2018/19 (ie, the last pre-pandemic year) and 2021/22 (the current academic year), by type of school. Note that it includes only state schools (because school-type data for independent schools is limited) and omits schools that advertise as part of a group or trust (because it is harder to associate these vacancies with specific schools).

Across all subjects, two regions, the North East and Yorkshire and the Humber, showed little change. In general, southern regions showed larger increases, though the North West posted the biggest rise of all. Areas of low deprivation, schools with small proportions of low-attaining and EAL pupils, single-sex schools, grammar schools and schools with sixth forms have generally shown the greatest increases since before the pandemic. Trends by other school types are more ambiguous. This picture is open to various interpretations, but seems consistent with the idea that schools in the most economically affluent areas and with the most highly trained staff have shown the largest increases in hiring activity, perhaps reflecting increased staff turnover and general tightness in these labour markets. This idea was also discussed in our recent study of school recruiting in Education Investment Areas.

There are interesting trends by subject too. For example, the regional pattern for English, Mathematics and Science generally show higher levels of recruiting in the south, while Languages and Technology display more or less the opposite trend.

(Use the menus below to explore different school groups and subjects. Hover over the columns to see corresponding data values and numbers of advertisements.)

Technicians too

The recent rise in technician adverts has been even more extreme, as shown in Figure 4 (and also the graph on page 7 of our joint report). Looking at the weekly data, we see that before the pandemic, in 2018-2019 (green line), peak season was in June and September. Activity collapsed in 2019-2020 (blue) but more than recovered in the latter part of 2020-2021 (red) and has been exceptionally high throughout 2021-2022 (purple), especially in the last couple of weeks – though it remains to be seen if activity will go even higher on either side of the summer holiday.

Looking again at all years together, this time through the lens of cumulative counts, we can see even more clearly the huge disparity this year. Note also the differences by subject, with bigger absolute increases in Technology and Science than in Arts or other subjects.

(Use the menus below to view weekly or cumulative data, and to select different subject areas. Click on the figure legend to hide or view individual academic years. Hover over the lines to see corresponding data values.)

Figure 5 shows even more clearly these changes by subject, both since last year (red columns) and since before the pandemic (blue). In percentage terms Technology and Arts showed the biggest increased compared to pre-pandemic levels, but comparing absolute numbers of ads shows Technology and Science to have posted the biggest increases.

(Use the menu below to switch between percentages and numbers of advertisements. Click on the figure legend to hide or view individual academic years. Hover over the columns to see corresponding data values.)

Figure 6 shows the percentage change in numbers of technician adverts between 2018/19 (ie, the last pre-pandemic year) and 2021/22 (the current academic year), by type of school. As for the teachers data in Figure 3, this includes only state schools and omits schools that advertise as part of a group or trust.

Across all subjects, Yorkshire and the Humber showed by far the smallest increase across among regions. As for teacher vacancies, areas of low deprivation and schools with small proportions of low-attaining or EAL pupils have tended to show the greatest increases. So have urban schools and those with higher proportions of ethnic-minority pupils. Trends by other school types are more ambiguous.

(Use the menus below to explore different school groups and subjects. Hover over the columns to see corresponding data values and numbers of advertisements.)

Steady heads

Unlike classroom subject teachers, headteacher changes can be tracked with data from the Department for Education (DfE), which publishes the names of school leaders, updating them daily when informed of new appointments. (Note that this is therefore often a lagging indicator, unlike vacancy advertisements, which are leading indicators.)

Figure 7 shows the number of headteacher changes for each month over the last three academic years, and for the current 2021/22 academic year up to and including Friday 17th June 2022. The annual peak is in September, with slightly raised turnover in January. Overall headteacher turnover has so far not changed much during or following the height of the pandemic. However, there are some underlying variations. In particular, out-of-season changes in January and April were higher than usual in 2021 and 2022. Note also the different patterns for primary schools and secondary schools.

(Use the menu below to switch between all schools, primary schools and secondary schools. Click on the figure legend to hide or view individual academic years. Hover over the columns to see corresponding data values.)

Conclusions

Having experienced an unprecedented slump in recruitment over the last two years, teachers and technicians now find themselves in a very substantial boom. Both present schools with challenges, albeit of different kinds. The difficulties of selecting new staff in the absence of face-to-face meetings, and of attracting them in the first place while everyone was locked-down, have now given way to an intensely competitive post-pandemic labour market. The analysis presented here and in our joint report suggests that schools are as affected as any other sector – and perhaps more than most – by these unfolding social and economic trends.

As ever, we welcome your thoughts: [email protected].

Footnotes:

1. This process does not capture all vacant positions because: (a) not all positions are advertised on school websites, (b) even when they are, they are not necessarily presented in a way that can be automatically indexed, and (c) websites are sometimes unresponsive or otherwise unavailable. For this reason, the data presented should be thought of as being based not on a comprehensive list of all vacancies but on a subset. However, positions have been detected for well over 90% of schools and these are broadly representative of the overall population of schools.

School recruitment in Education Investment Areas

14th June 2022 by Timo Hannay [link]

Update 14th June 2022: See also this coverage from TES.

In our last blog post we looked at the rationale for addressing educational inequalities by grouping schools based on their location – specifically, whether or not they fall into one of the 55 Education Investment Areas (EIAs) designated in the government's Leveling Up White Paper. We concluded that this approach, if applied too crudely, risks confusing the symptom (differences in the average educational effectiveness of local authorities) for the disease (underperforming schools all around the country, though unequally distributed).

We now find ourselves in high season for teacher recruitment, an area that is rightly a policy priority and another cornerstone of the government's levelling-up programme for education. Together with our collaborators at Teacher Tapp and the Gatsby Foundation, we will soon be reporting on the overall situation in school hiring. In the meantime, this post focuses on the narrower but still important question of whether school recruitment in EIAs looks any different to that in other parts of the country, and if so how.

We would like to thank the Gatsby Foundation for the generous support that has made this analysis possible.

In summary, we find that:

• Across both primary and secondary schools, teacher recruitment activity in EIAs tends to be lower than elsewhere, a trend that predates the pandemic. This could be because of looser labour markets in less affluent areas, or the effects of charitable and governmental support to attract teachers to such schools, or perhaps some combination of both.
• Among secondary schools, this does not appear to be a subject-specific effect: different subjects show very different numbers of vacancies, but the ratios of vacancies between EIAs and other areas tend to be similar.
• That said, science teaching vacancies in EIAs are much less likely to stipulate a particular specialty (ie, Biology, Chemistry or Physics rather than just Science in general). This is consistent with our previous findings and with GCSE entry rates in those areas.
• This lends some support to the policy of offering retention bonuses to early-career teachers working at selected schools if they teach certain priority subjects such as Chemistry and Physics, and for increasing these bonuses if the school is located in an EIA. However, success also requires that the schools themselves seek such specialist teachers in the first place.

Rates of interest

For several years, SchoolDash has been gathering vacancies data by indexing the websites of secondary schools, sixth form colleges and further education colleges across England. This approach does not identify every relevant vacancy¹ (no such list exists), but it appears to capture a large proportion of them and certainly provides a useful way to conduct like-for-like comparisons of recruiting trends across different groups of schools, as well as changes over time. (See for example our October 2021 study and the earlier reasearch linked to from there.)

The analysis that follows looks at numbers of advertisements appearing between 1st January and 3rd June 2022, and compares these to the same periods in preceding years, both before the COVID-19 pandemic (2019) and during it (2020 and 2021).

Figure 1 shows advertising activity at mainstream state secondary schools in England across a range of subject areas. EIAs represent a minority of local authorities, schools and teachers, so it isn't meaningful to directly compare raw numbers of adverts. For this reason, we use advertising rates expressed in terms of adverts per 1,000 teachers². In 2019 (ie, before the pandemic), EIA schools (red columns) advertised at lower rates than non-EIA schools (blue columns) across all disciplines. In 2020 and 2021, advertising rates fell across the board due to the disruptions associated with the pandemic (see our previous studies), but the differences between EIA an non-EIA schools remained relatively constant. The same was true in early 2022, even as advertising rates rose again following the lifting of most pandemic-related restrictions.

(Use the menu below to select a year. Click on the legend to show or hide each group of schools. Hover over the columns to see corresponding values.)

Figure 2 shows the percentage differences in advertising rates between EIA and non-EIA schools for the same subjects seen in Figure 1. In 2019, non-EIA schools generally had advertising rates around 20% to 40% higher than EIA schools. By 2022, these differences had fallen a bit, but by no means disappeared.

(Use the menu below to select a year. Hover over the columns to see corresponding values.)

On the face of it, this suggests that non-EIA schools might be suffering from greater teacher turnover than EIA schools, perhaps because there are more alternative employment options in those areas. But before arriving at this conclusion, it is worth considering other potential explanations:

• In some areas of the curriculum, such as Business and Music³, non-EIA schools might be more likely to offer the subject in the first place. However, this isn't the case for core academic subjects such as Science, Mathematics, English, Geography and History, which nevertheless show considerable disparities in recruitment activity. (See Figure 3, below, for relevant GCSE entry rates in EIA and non-EIA schools⁴.)
• EIA schools might be less likely to employ part-time teachers, which would reduce the total number of vacancies for any given size of school. This is why we calculate advertising rates using teacher headcounts rather than FTEs (see Footnote 2). There are indeed regional disparities in proportions of part-time teachers, but unless these have been increasing (which they haven't⁵), they can't explain the ongoing differences in advertising rates between EIA and non-EIA schools.
• EIA schools could be more likely to advertise through a multi-academy trust (MAT). We track these positions too, but are often unable to assign them to a specific school, in which case they are excluded from the EIA analysis. There is something to this: schools that currently advertise mainly or solely at a MAT level are split 50/50 between EIA and non-EIA schools (the same applies if we look at numbers of teachers instead of schools). In contrast, of those that recruit at a school level, just a third are EIA schools. However, only a small minority of schools (around 12%, accounting for 13% of teachers) recruit at a MAT level in the first place, so the overall effect can only account for a few percentage points of difference, which is much smaller than we see. Note also that the proportion of vacancies advertised through MATs has been gradually increasing, so it was lower than this in earlier years.
• Perhaps EIA schools that have vacancies are less likely to advertise on their own websites. We cannot eliminate this possibility, but there seems no obvious reason why it should be true.

In our view, then, the disparity between EIA and non-EIA schools appears to be a real one that largely reflects actual underlying recruiting rates, presumably driven by staff turnover. If so, what might explain it?

One clue comes from Figure 4, which shows 2022 recruiting rates for various groups of schools. Unsurprisingly, we see regional differences, with southern areas (which are generally more affluent and contain fewer EIAs) tending to have higher rates than northern ones. There is also a clear pattern by local deprivation level, but not by school deprivation level. In other words, schools located in poorer areas tend to show lower recruiting activity, but this does not appear to be because the school community itself is poorer. While far from conclusive, this is consistent with the idea that local labour markets might be having an effect – we would expect these to be looser in poorer areas and tighter (ie, more competitive) in relatively affluent areas.

(Use the menu below to select a school grouping. Hover over the columns to see corresponding values.)

In addition to labour market effects, charitable and governmental interventions to support school recruiting in poorer areas might also be having an impact. This is something we hope to analyse in future.

The specialisation gap

Another important disparity between EIA and non-EIA schools is illustrated in Figure 5. This shows the proportions of science teacher adverts that specify 'Biology', 'Chemistry' or 'Physics' rather than just 'Science' in general. For non-EIA schools, this has been very stable at around 30%, while For EIA, schools it has consistently been much lower at around 20%. (Recall that this is on top of the fact that non-EIA schools also issue larger numbers of science teacher adverts of all kinds.)

(Hover over the points in the figure to see corresponding values.)

The most plausible explanation is that EIA schools are less likely to seek a specialist when trying to fill a science teaching vacancy. This is consistent with our previous studies (see posts from November and April 2019), and also with the fact that EIA schools have lower GCSE entry rates for Biology, Chemistry and Physics, but higher ones for Double Science, as shown in Figure 6, below⁶.

Starting in the 2022-2023 academic year, the government is introducing 'levelling-up premium payments' of £1,500-£3,000 for early-career teachers in Chemistry, Computing, Mathematics and Physics who work at designated schools. There are higher payments (£2,000-£3,000) where the school is also in an EIA. Analysis by Gatsby and UCL suggests that this will help to improve retention as well as being much more cost-effective than training new teachers to replace lost staff. However, to work fully it also requires schools in more disadvantaged areas to seek specialist teachers in the first place. Despite evidence that these roles are no harder to fill, it appears that they remain more inclined to seek generalist science teachers instead.

Technical difficulties?

The differences in advertising rates between EIA and non-EIA schools are not limited to teacher vacancies. Figure 7 shows the same analysis we saw in Figure 1, but this time for school technicians. Here, too, EIA schools advertise at lower rates than non-EIA schools. This was consistent across periods before (2019), during (2020, 2021) and after (2022) restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, even as overall recruiting activity waxed and waned. Note that, unlike teaching vacancies, the filling of technician vacancies is not typically subject to charitable or governmental support, which makes it seem more likely that local labour markets are driving these disparities.

(Use the menu to select a year. Hover over the columns to see corresponding values.)

Primary data

The above results are all for secondary schools. Since April 2022, in collaboration with Teach First, we have begun to collect data on primary school vacancies as well. A preliminary analysis by school type is shown in Figure 8. Here too, EIA schools seem to advertise at lower rates than non-EIA schools, though the disparity is smaller than for secondary schools. The differences by region, however, are very marked. Also, we see a similar pattern to secondary schools in which local deprivation appears to affect advertising rates, but in-school deprivation doesn't.

(Use the menu to select a school grouping. Hover over the columns to see corresponding values.)

Teaching talent

There is undeniably a pressing need to get great teachers into schools, particularly those serving more disadvantaged children, families and communities. In addition, we take two further messages from this analysis. First, all kinds of schools, not just those in the poorest areas, face challenges with recruitment. Indeed, those serving poorer communities in economically vibrant areas might be among the most in need of help. Second, there are disparities that go beyond simply filling teacher vacancies. In particular, schools in poorer areas consistently hire fewer specialist science teachers. Policy interventions such as bonus payments can help to attract and retain such staff, but for these gaps to close fully, schools in disadvantaged areas must seek these teachers in the first place.

Footnotes:

1. Not all vacancies are advertised on school or college websites. Even when they are, sometimes the website is unresponsive, and at other times vacancies are presented or described in ways that make them difficult for our software to identify.
2. We use total teacher headcount rather than FTEs because adverts, many of which are for part-time positions, are usually to replace people, not FTEs. In any case, we have run the analysis both ways and it turns out that this choice makes no practical difference to the overall conclusions.
3. These subjects show considerable regional variations in popularity. Subscribers to SchoolDash Insights can refer to the relevant regional maps for Business and Music.
4. Note that although Geography shows a difference, overall entry rates are relatively high, so the disparity is smaller in proportional terms than for Business or Music.
5. SchoolDash Insights subscribers can compare regional variations in 2020 with those in, say, 2015 and see that there has been very little change over time.
6. Perhaps unsurprisingly, GCSE Biology, Chemistry and Physics also tend to be more popular in southern regions while Double Science is more common in northern regions. Subscribers to SchoolDash Insights can see this in the regional maps for GCSE Double Science, Biology, Chemistry and Physics.