Newly qualified teachers are finding that there are up to 40% fewer jobs this year. Are we simply turning out too many?
It never crossed Haley Pilkington's mind that she wouldn't be starting work as a teacher this month. After successfully completing a first degree in French and Spanish at the University of Newcastle, she received a £6,000 bursary to do a PGCE in modern foreign languages at Chester University.
"The bursary, together with the renewed emphasis on languages in the English baccalaureate, suggested that I might be in demand," she says. "But it has been harder to find a job than I'd imagined. Perhaps I've been naive."
Pilkington has applied for 10 jobs in the last year and has had four interviews. "Each time, there were more candidates than I'd expected. In one school, we were warned at the start that they had had a very strong field of applicants and the standard had been higher than anyone could remember."
She has registered with supply agencies. "I was confident I'd be starting a job this term. I have to remain optimistic and believe it's just a matter of time," Pilkington says. "Everyone told me there would be a rush of jobs becoming available once we neared the end of our courses, but that never happened."
Her experience is all too familiar. Newly qualified teachers entered the employment market this year, having paid annual tuition fees of £3,375 – set to rise to up to £9,000 next year – to find approximately 40% fewer full-time jobs available. According to one set of figures, between January and August alone the number of posts advertised across all sectors fell by about 2,500 on the same period last year, with significant regional variations.
Among the worst-hit areas is the West Midlands, where there were more than 700 fewer posts advertised than the previous year, followed by the north-west, with 552 fewer vacancies. London had one of the lowest discrepancies year on year, with 188 fewer posts, with only the north-east faring better, with just 40. Wales had more vacancies this year than in 2010 – 993, compared with 871.
Professor John Howson, director of Data for Education, which monitors teacher recruitment, visiting professor at Oxford Brookes and the Institute of Education, and senior research fellow at Oxford University, says there are simply no longer enough jobs to go round.
"The majority of those who are looking for jobs are NQTs, and many schools don't want new, inexperienced teachers if they know they have an Ofsted inspection coming up," he says. "The market is very complex at the moment. In schools with budget problems, for example, teachers are being moved sideways when colleagues leave to avoid redundancies, so space is not being freed up for new recruits.
"We are now in a boom-and-bust situation and we can expect two or three years of this over-supply. I'm afraid that anyone who began their teacher training thinking they would easily get a job was misinformed, as that situation has not existed for the last five years."
It's not long since we all saw TV commercials encouraging people to become teachers. But Howson says: "There is no longer any such thing as a shortage subject, and the jobs market has been tightening across the board for a while."
That is not the impression held by many aspiring teachers, however. Sarah Carpenter was a registered child minder, foster carer and teaching assistant before signing up for a PGCE in primary education at the University of Gloucestershire, at the age of 41.
"I was told by a headteacher that I'd be snapped up in no time," she says. But despite submitting 18 applications, she has had just one interview.
Carpenter believes that schools simply cannot afford to invest the time and money required to hire NQTs. "Although we are cheaper on wages, we present a huge commitment to schools in terms of time and training.
"We are entitled to time away from the class, which has to be covered, and our local training centre for NQTs has recently been shut because of cuts, so it would be up to schools to organise that themselves.
"I hear that universities are taking on even more trainees for next year. Someone needs to put a stop to this because they can't keep training people if there are no jobs."
Another primary teacher, Christina Sinclair, has just completed a BA in education at Oxford Brookes University. She has applied for 15 jobs, and believes that one post she went for had attracted 170 applicants. "The alarm bells starting ringing at my teaching placement," she says. "I heard one of the senior management team complaining to a colleague that the existing NQT didn't know anything and what a hassle it was to have to train her, like she was a burden on the school.
"How can we get any experience when no one will employ us?"
Government plans to pass teacher training directly to schools are unlikely to have an impact, as it is still unclear how many training schools there will be and where these will be located. Schools currently seem reluctant to take up the mantle until they know what mechanisms there will be in place to allow them to award PGCEs, how many trainees they will be expected to take on and how they will be funded.
James Williams, lecturer in science education at Sussex University, says schools increasingly favour experienced teachers over cheaper new recruits. "They say they want outstanding teachers, but that's ridiculous – it's like saying to pass your driving test you have to be an advanced driver."
Williams believes the government should reform the system to match supply and demand. One way might be to make teacher training a two-year course, where students do the first year at university and the second year in school.
"This would guarantee that new teachers are employed in a school for at least a year, and would allow them to complete their induction."
He also wants to see more regional planning. Currently, the system relies on new entrants being flexible and moving to where the jobs are. "More mature entrants to teaching with home and family commitments may not be so mobile," he says.
Howson advocates a complete moratorium on all training for a year or two to allow the backlog to clear. But fundamentally, he says, a complete re-think is required of how teachers are trained.
"As people are now expected to pay for higher education, it's unfair that they make sacrifices only to find they have no job afterwards," he says. "You wouldn't expect this of a civil servant, or a police officer. If you are taken on as a trainee, then you should have the guarantee of a job at the end of it.
"Furthermore, we risk losing some of the best applicants altogether. There is no mechanism for ensuring that the best trainees get the jobs and that we can hang on to them."
There appear to be no such safeguards in the pipeline. Neither the Department for Education nor the Training and Development Agency for Schools acknowledge there may be a problem. A DfE spokesman said: "Getting a job as a teacher can be a competitive process. We carefully analyse the level of demand for teachers each year when deciding how many new teacher-training places to make available."
Meanwhile, the TDA said that targets for teacher-trainee places "reflect the number of newly qualified teachers that are required to meet the demands of schools".
"The targets are based on the Teacher Supply Model, which considers a range of data such as falling/rising pupil numbers, existing teacher numbers by age groups and people taking career breaks and people returning to teach," a spokesman said.
But someone has to seize the initiative, Howson says. "The government and providers have a responsibility. The reality is that training colleges need to admit students to remain financially viable, while no government sees it as its problem if there are too many teachers. So we are at something of a stalemate."
*Some names in this article have been changed at the request of the teachers involved.
'Competing with 80 others for each job grinds you down'
"When a bottom year 9 set asks you if you're a qualified science teacher because they're fed up of supply staff, you know that things in that school aren't right. Children can't be fooled – they just want to know they are being taught by a 'proper' teacher."
Hannah McLean completed her PGCE at Liverpool Hope University in 2010, having done a degree in history and a master's in medieval and renaissance history at the University of Liverpool. But she has failed to get a permanent job and has been doing supply work for the last year in north London.
No amount of delivering outstanding lessons or excellent interview feedback has secured her a full-time post.
McLean has applied for about 30 jobs, but had only seven interviews. "In the last one, I was told by the head of department that my lesson was outstanding, but the job went to the PGCE student who had just completed her placement there," she says.
The constant process of applying for jobs is starting to take a toll. "I am seriously considering whether to carry on," McLean says. "My love for teaching remains undiminished and it's all I've ever wanted to do, but coming up against up to 80 applicants for each job is really grinding me down. I just don't understand why we're training so many teachers if there are not enough jobs."