What are the teacher-vacancy trends across English schools?
This post takes a quick look at the trends so far by examining year-on-year changes by subject area, in collaboration with SchoolDash.
The national trends…
The data used below has been gathered by SchoolDash from the websites of secondary schools, sixth-form college and further education colleges in England. They index these every night looking for vacancies – it really is the cutting edge job vacancies website I’ve not seen in any other context, not even the TES! Of course, this doesn’t mean SchoolDash finds every new teaching position (well over 90 per cent) – some are not advertised online, while some school websites cannot be indexed, yet reflect national trends more than most.
Changes in the number of teacher recruitment advertisements
Figure 1 shows cumulative year-on-year changes in the number of teacher vacancies over the last 12 months. More specifically, it compares the numbers of vacancies found each week between March 2019 and February 2020 with those found in the corresponding weeks between March 2018 and February 2019.
- Nearly 1,800 more vacancies in the last 12 months than a year earlier, note the different timing of Easter
- Approximately, half of this year-on-year increase occurred during May and June 2019
- The other half increase has occurred during January and February 2020
- There were also more modest rises during the autumn of 2019.
- The image below shows key subjects and all subjects cumulative.
An analysis for headteachers…
- The largest increases were seen in Maths and Music/Drama (>peripatetic positions).
- There were modest rises in D and T, Languages, RE, Technology (ie, computing) and English
- Geography and History have remained broadly flat and Science is currently down year on year
- Don’t forget! You can list all teacher vacancies of the Department for Education website for free
- Visit SchoolDash to see their previous analysis.
It is important to recognise that these numbers provide only a snapshot of recent changes. For example, the recent increase in language teaching positions follows previous declines, while the decrease in science positions comes off the back of earlier increases.
