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Young people’s interest in teaching has not changed much over the past decade, suggesting issues such as increasing workloads and lack of flexibility are causing a recruitment crisis, a new report suggests.
The National Foundation for Educational Research concluded that changing career preferences are not the cause of “persistently sluggish” teacher recruitment.
The group recently predicted the government would again miss its September teacher recruitment targets for the 11th time in 12 years, with almost as many teachers leaving the teaching profession as joining this year.
Co-authors Dawson MacLean and Jack Worth said the findings “reinforce that addressing the declining attractiveness of the teaching profession is key to solving the teacher shortage problem.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said the survey was “welcome as it establishes that interest in the teaching profession has not waned among graduates, despite the serious recruitment and retention crisis facing schools.”
“But for this interest to translate into an influx of new teachers attracted by the promise of a fulfilling and sustainable career, it shows the new government has much work to do to help improve the realities and conditions of work.”
Their analysis was based primarily on survey data collected between 2002 and 2023, focusing on responses from people who were aged 16 to 21 at the time.
The researchers looked at the percentage of young people who said they wanted to be teachers each year, and then looked at what occupation they had when they were between 22 and 25 years old.
Since 2011, the focus on education has remained consistent
The analysis finds little evidence that recent graduates are losing interest in “social impact” careers, suggesting other factors are at play.
The percentage of students who said they wanted to become teachers surged from about 4% in 2002 to a peak of 16% in 2008, but interest has declined, remaining at about 6% between 2011 and 2021.
The survey found that interest in education tends to increase with age and that young people’s career aspirations are predictive of whether they will become educators.
Of those who became teachers by age 25, 61 percent said they wanted to be a teacher when they were 19-21.
Making education competitive to reach the 6,500 student target
The new Labour government has made the recruitment of 6,500 new teachers one of its key priorities.
The report warned that new ministers must ensure teaching is a “competitive career choice” if they want to achieve their targets.
“There is not an unlimited supply of socially conscious people in the workforce,” the report warns, and teaching is not an attractive profession for people keen to pursue a “socially conscious” career.
The report said many people are also looking for work in fields such as nursing, healthcare and long-term care, which have their own unique recruitment challenges.
Therefore, making teaching more attractive by offering better salaries or a more manageable workload could expand the pool of graduates available for recruitment.
“This may also have the added benefit of reducing recruitment pressure on other socially oriented civil service positions,” the report added.
Teachers are motivated by social contribution rather than salary
The NFER noted that teacher salary growth was closer to average earnings growth in the early 2000s than it was in the 2010s, a period that saw a series of advertising campaigns run prior to that.
Meanwhile, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that teacher pay has fallen by 6% in real terms since 2010.
However, NFER found that teachers tend to have different career motivations to people entering other professions at the age of 19-21, with ambition based on the element of ‘contributing to society’ being a key difference.
Perhaps not surprisingly, those who became teachers were more motivated to “help others” and “contribute to society.”
Among those who became teachers by age 25, only 12% said that a high salary was important to their future careers — less than half the percentage of those who did not become teachers.
NFER modelling found that people with ‘pro-social’ career motivations were 4 percentage points more likely to say they wanted to become a teacher and 2 percentage points more likely to actually become a teacher than those without these motivations.
The career aspirations of young people have not changed “dramatically” over time, but there has been a slight increase in the proportion of people who say factors such as “helping others” and “contributing to society” are very important when considering a career, the report said.
NFER also found that Gen Z young people born after 1997 are “more likely to fit the motivation profile of future teachers than millennials.”