Recruitment of support and auxiliary staff at schools and colleges in England: An update

22nd March 2024 by Timo Hannay [link]

Update 22nd March 2024: See also this coverage in Tes.

Yesterday we provided an update on the state of teacher and technician recruitment among secondary schools and colleges in England. This post looks more generally at support and auxiliary staff. In summary, we find that:

• There has been a large and sustained increases in recruitment activity since the end of the pandemic across a wide range of support and auxiliary positions.
• There are, however, differences by type of role. The biggest percentage increases have been for pastoral managers, cover supervisors, caretakers/cleaners and attendance officers. The biggest increases in absolute numbers of adverts have been for teaching assistants, cover supervisors and administrative assistants.
• The persistence of these trends three years after the end of the pandemic may force us to conclude that these are no longer temporary abberations, but a new normal to which the education system must adapt.

As with our previous study of support and auxiliary positions, published in September 2022, this analysis uses a more rough and ready approach than the one we apply to adverts for teachers and technicians. All of our recruitment analyses make use of an automated system to identify relevant adverts on school and college websites. For teacher and technician vacancies, we compile the data weekly and carry out manual checks to ensure that none of the items are spurious (ie, that mentions of a role are in the context of a recruitment advert). However, for these occasional dives into support and auxiliary positions, we take a less labour-intensive approach. This makes use of the fact that we already have nightly snapshots of each school and college websites going back over many years, so we can apply the same automatic detection system, but without conducting manual checks on each advert, which would be impractical over such a vast archive.

For these reasons, we expect a higher rate of false positives, though our experience in curating teacher and technician positions suggest that these should be no more than 10-15% of all putative adverts detected. Note also that both approaches can lead to false negatives, which by their nature are hard to quantify and correct (see the footnote in our June 2023 study for details). In any case, as long as biases are reasonably small and consistent, they still allow for analysis of changing recruitment activity over time even if the absolute values overstate or understate the true numbers of adverts. For a longer discussion of these issues, please see our previous analysis, including the accompanying footnote. Because we can't be certain that all of the items detected correspond to adverts, our previous study referred to them as 'mentions' instead. Here we will use the term 'putative adverts', or simply 'adverts', but we are referring to the same thing.

Popular support

Figure 1 shows the total number of putative adverts detected each week, smoothed to improve legibility by showing the 3-week moving average. The black line includes all secondary schools and colleges, while the red line shows only secondary schools – filtering out standalone sixth form colleges, university technical colleges and further education colleges. This makes it clear that the vast majority of the data shown here and in the other figures below are derived from secondary schools. Click here to see both lines again. (For those with a special interest in colleges, rest assured that we will be reporting on these soon, and in plenty of detail.)

Recruitment of these positions tends to be seasonal, with peaks in the early summer and autumn, and troughs in the spring, late summer and winter. (This is different to the seasonality of teacher recruitment, which shows big annual peaks in the late spring.) It is also apparent that activity fell during the national lockdowns starting in spring 2020 and early 2021 (the two lowest points on the graph), but has since sustained much higher levels than before the pandemic.

(Click on the figure legend below to turn each line on or off. Hover over the graph to see corresponding data values.)

Figure 2 shows the same data are Figure 1, but with each academic year overlaid, making it easier to see year-on-year changes. The easiest way to see these differences is to look at cumulative data for all roles. The last pre-pandemic year was 2018/19 (red line). The following year, 2019/20 (yellow) was running ahead of this until the national lockdown in March 2020, when activity fell back. The following year, 2020/21 (green), showed higher total activity, but only from spring 2021 onwards, after the second national lockdown started to ease. Since then (blue and purple), activity has been at unusually high levels every year, and so far 2023/24 (black) is continuing to track similarly.

There is considerable difference by role. For example (looking once again at cumulative data), there has been a large increase in putative adverts for pastoral managers, but a decrease in those for business managers. Other roles are generally somewhere in between. Teaching assistants and cover supervisors are the most numerous roles, and have both shown substantial and sustained increases.

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

Figure 3 summarises these differences by role, comparing numbers of putative adverts in the full 2022/23 academic year (red columns) or the 2023/24 academic year to date (blue) with the corresponding periods in the last pre-pandemic year, 2018/19. The biggest percentage increases have been for pastoral managers, cover supervisors, caretakers/cleaners and attendance officers. The biggest increases in absolute numbers of adverts have been for teaching assistants, cover supervisors and administrative assistants.

It is interesting to consider possible reasons why these variations between different roles arise. The fact that the largest increases in absolute numbers of adverts were for teaching assistants, cover supervisors and administrative assistants is easy to explain: they represented the largest numbers of adverts to begin with, collectively accounting for nearly half of all putative adverts found in in 2018/19. Explaining the large percentage increases in putative adverts for pastoral managers, cover supervisors, caretakers/cleaners and attendance officers is harder, but it is tempting to speculate that they might be linked, respectively, to rising mental health concerns, post-pandemic increases in staff absence, a tightening labour market for manual roles, and recent increases in pupil absence. Of course, other causes might – and probably do – exist.

(Use the menus below to switch between percentage changes and changes in numbers of adverts. Click on the figure legend to hide or view individual academic years. Hover over the columns to see corresponding data values.)

These results show that the trends we have already seen for technicians – namely large and sustained increases in recruitment activity since the end of the pandemic – can be observed across a much wider range of support and auxiliary positions, though not equally for all of them. As we commented yesterday, the longer these trends persist and the further away we get from the end of the pandemic, the more we may be forced to conclude that these are no longer temporary abberations, but a new normal to which we must adapt.

We welcome your views – please write to us at [email protected]. To keep up to date with more analyses like this one, sign up for our free monthly-ish newsletter. SchoolDash Insights subscribers can explore these trends further in the Recruitment section. Non-subscribers are welcome to request a trial account or a demo.

The 2023/24 recruiting season for secondary schools and colleges in England: An interim report

21st March 2024 by Timo Hannay [link]

Update 21st March 2024: See also this coverage in Tes.

The last time we reported on secondary school and college recruitment in England, back in June 2023, activity was at an all-time high. After two depressed years during the pandemic, we had just seen a second post-pandemic year of hyperactivity and ended up wondering how long the after-effects of COVID-19 would go on. As peak hiring season for the current academic year approaches, we are in a position to start exploring that question.

This interim analysis finds that:

• So far in 2023/24, recruitment of teachers is running close to the exceptionally elevated levels seen in 2022/23. However, this is mainly due to higher-than-usual levels seen between September and December, when activity is usually low. Since then, it has fallen closer to pre-pandemic levels. It remains to be seen whether the current academic year will end up showing higher overall activity than a typical pre-pandemic year, or simply a shift of activity to earlier in the school year.
• There are considerable differences by subject, with English, Mathematics and Science back at roughly pre-pandemic levels, while Art, Music and Drama remain elevated. There are also regional disparities, with activity in the North East now below pre-pandemic levels, while that in the North West and West Midlands remains much higher than before COVID-19 struck.
• Technician positions are fewer in number than teacher positions, but adverts for them have seen a much bigger proportional rise since the end of the pandemic. Levels this year are much closer to normal, but still somewhat elevated, with variations by subject.
• It is unclear how many of these ongoing anomalies are due to the continuing direct effects of the pandemic as opposed to other demographic and socioeconomic disruptions, such as Brexit, the cost-of-living crisis and the current tight labour market. It may be that school recruitment in England will never quite to return to its pre-pandemic state.

Our full annual report with Teacher Tapp and The Gatsby Foundation will appear as usual in June. In the meantime, read on for further details of what has happened so far this year. For more information about how these data were gathered, please see our previous post, including the accompanying footnote.

We once again thank The Gatsby Foundation for so generously supporting this work.

Targeting teachers

Figure 1 shows the number of teacher vacancy adverts found each week on school and college websites from September 2017 to February 2024.

There is a clear seasonality, with peaks in the spring and troughs in the summer. Across the whole period, two normal pre-pandemic years (September 2017 to September 2019) were followed by two subdued years during the COVID-induced lockdowns (September 2019 to September 2021) and then two years of post-pandemic hyperactivity (September 2021 to September 2023). We have yet to reach peak season in 2023/24, but so far activity seems to have been higher than normal in the early part of the school year (September to December) and more normal recently (January to March).

(Hover over the graph below to see corresponding data values.)

Figure 2 shows the same data, but with each academic year overlaid to make year-on-year changes easier to see. Looking at weekly data for all subjects, it is clear that the seasonality is similar for each year, but with considerable variation in overall levels of hiring.

Viewing cumulative data (again, for all subjects) makes these year-on-year changes easier to see. The last pre-pandemic year, 2018/19 (red line) was followed by declines in 2019/20 (yellow) and 2020/21 (green), then large increases in 2021/22 (blue) and 2022/23 (purple). So far, 2023/24 (black) is tracking closest to last year, but it is not yet clear where it will end up following the high season in April and May. To put it another way, we don't yet know if overall hiring this year will be above normal pre-pandemic levels or simply shifted to earlier in the year – or perhaps both.

There is considerable variation by subject. For example (once again viewing cumulative data), English, Mathematics and Science are at roughly pre-pandemic levels, while Music and Drama, as well as Art, are at their highest ever levels. Click here to see all subjects again.

(Use the menus below to switch between weekly and cumulative data, and between different subjects. Click on the figure legend to turn show or hide individual years. Hover over the graph to see corresponding data values.)

Figure 3 shows the cumulative difference in number of teacher adverts relative to the 2017-2018 academic year. If activity in subsequent years had been the same as in that year, we would get a flat line. Instead we see a gradual rise during 2018-2019 followed by a rapid decline from March 2020, during the first lockdown in England, and again in early 2021 with the second national lockdown. The net effect was about 9,000 fewer teacher vacancy adverts than we might have otherwise expected. But with the post-pandemic boom in recruiting activity, this deficit has long since reversed, reaching a net difference of zero by October 2022, and a net gain of almost 12,000 extra adverts at the end of February 2024 – or almost 20,000 extra adverts in the last two years. Whether this trend is now flattening off remains unclear.

(Hover over the graph to see corresponding data values.)

Figure 4 shows similar results to those in Figure 2, but broken down by school type and location rather than subject. The biggest differences are regional: looking at cumulative data, the current year trend (black line) is below pre-pandemic levels (red) in the North East, but at pre-pandemic levels in the East Midlands, and running well above them in the North West and the West Midlands. It is also noticeable that areas of high deprivation have shown greater volatility than those of low deprivation. Click here to see all schools again.

The reasons for such disparities are likely to be multifaceted and could include variations the impacts of the pandemic, in overall unemployment rates, in the effects of migration, and in the characteristics of local populations and economies. Answering such questions with any certainty will require further research.

(Use the menus below to switch between weekly and cumulative data, and between different school types or locations. Click on the figure legend to turn show or hide individual years. Hover over the graph to see corresponding data values.)

Technical details

Figure 5 shows equivalent data for technician adverts. These are much less numerous than teacher adverts and also display different seasonality, with peaks on either side of the summer holidays. Looking at cumulative data, it is evident the the last pre-pandemic year in 2018/19 (red line) was followed by a sharp decline in 2019/20 (yellow) and a delayed rebound in 2020/21 (green). There then followed two years of exceedingly high activity in 2021/22 (blue) and 2022/23 (purple). So far, 2023/24 (black) is tracking closer to pre-pandemic years, but still at slightly elevated levels.

There are also differences by subject. For example, Art continues to show relatively high activity, while Science and Computing do not. Click here to see all subjects again.

(Use the menus below to switch between weekly and cumulative data, and between different subjects. Click on the figure legend to turn show or hide individual years. Hover over the graph to see corresponding data values.)

Figure 6 shows the cumulative difference in number of technician adverts relative to the 2017-2018 academic year. As we saw for teachers in Figure 3, there is a gradual rise during 2018-2019 followed by a rapid decline from March 2020 and again in early 2021 (corresponding to the two national lockdowns). The net effect was about 500 fewer technician vacancy adverts than we might have otherwise expected. But this was nothing compared to the post-pandemic surge in recruiting activity, producing a net gain of well over 4,000 extra adverts at the end of February 2024, and almost 5,000 extra ads over the last three years. This rise now appears to be slowing, but continues nonetheless.

(Hover over the graph to see corresponding data values.)

A new normal?

It will be interesting to see how these trends play out after Easter, during the peak teacher hiring season in April and May. But it already seems clear that things remain far from normal, at least by pre-pandemic standards. It is unclear how much of this is due to continuing direct effects of the pandemic as opposed to other demographic and socioeconomic changes related to, say, Brexit, the cost-of-living crisis or the tight labour market. Of course, these phenomena are themselves interconnected in various ways. At some point we may just need to accept that these abnormal-seeming times are in fact our new normal.

Look out for further analyses coming soon on this blog, and our full annual report in June. In the meantime, this new Teacher Labour Market Report from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) is well worth a read.

We also welcome your views: please write to us at [email protected]. To keep up to date with more analyses like this one, sign up for our free monthly-ish newsletter. Subscribers to SchoolDash Insights can explore these trends further in the Recruitment section. Non-subscribers are welcome to request a trial account or a demo.