How much do post-pandemic recruiting trends vary across schools?

Figure 1: Teacher recruitment adverts among secondary schools and colleges in England
Note: Dates on the horizontal axis are for the 2020-2021 academic year. Values for 2019-2020 are those corresponding to periods exactly 52 weeks earlier, those for 2018-2019 to 104 weeks earlier, those for 2021-2022 to 52 weeks later and those for 2022-2023 to 104 weeks later. This aligns days of the week at the expense of a slight mismatch in dates.
Sources: Secondary school, sixth-form college and FE college websites; SchoolDash Insights; SchoolDash analysis.
  1. A small but growing proportion of school recruitment happens at trust or confederation level, which makes it harder to assign these vacancies to a particular school with a well-defined location and specific characteristics. In many case, this doesn't make much difference, but when looking at long-term changes in numbers of vacancies, this can sometimes swamp the changes we're seeking to measure. The analysis presented here uses comparisons that appear not to be unduly influenced by this potential confounder.

Hire and higher: Schools recruit like never before

  • The rate at which secondary schools in England have been advertising teacher vacancies has risen sharply since the end of the pandemic. The effect so far has been to reverse all of the shortfall in adverts seen during two years of pandemic-induced disruption, and we haven't yet reached high season for recruitment.
  • These effects vary by subject, but large increases have been seen across both STEM (eg, Science, Design & Technology and Computing), and the humanities (eg, Languages, Music/Drama and Religion).
  • Technician advertisements, while fewer in number, have seen an even more spectacular rise, with post-pandemic levels of recruiting around 50% higher than before the pandemic and well over 3,000 'excess' adverts over the last two years.
  • This is a prelude to a fuller analysis that we will be conducting with the Gatsby Foundation and Teacher Tapp, and publishing in the summer.
Figure 1: Teacher recruitment adverts among secondary schools and colleges in England
Sources: Secondary school, sixth-form college and FE college websites; SchoolDash Insights; SchoolDash analysis.
Figure 2: Teacher recruitment adverts among secondary schools and colleges in England
Note: Dates on the horizontal axis are for the 2020-2021 academic year. Values for 2019-2020 are those corresponding to periods exactly 52 weeks earlier, those for 2018-2019 to 104 weeks earlier, those for 2021-2022 to 52 weeks later and those for 2022-2023 to 104 weeks later. This aligns days of the week at the expense of a slight mismatch in dates.
Sources: Secondary school, sixth-form college and FE college websites; SchoolDash Insights; SchoolDash analysis.
Figure 3: Cumulative difference in teacher recruitment adverts relative to 2017-2018 academic year
Sources: Secondary school, sixth-form college and FE college websites; SchoolDash Insights; SchoolDash analysis.
Figure 4: Technician recruitment adverts among secondary schools and colleges in England
Sources: Secondary school, sixth-form college and FE college websites; SchoolDash Insights; SchoolDash analysis.
Figure 5: Cumulative difference in technician recruitment adverts relative to 2017-2018 academic year
Sources: Secondary school, sixth-form college and FE college websites; SchoolDash Insights; SchoolDash analysis.
 

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