Creating Value In Schools
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NFER’s Teacher Labour Market in England 2025 report shows teacher recruitment and retention in a ‘perilous state’, presenting an ‘on-going risk to the quality of education’ (report page 3).
Report recommendations include an improved pay award over the next three years, more action to reduce workload, more flexible working, and a focus on improving behaviour.
While teacher working hours have reduced slightly since previous reports, they’re still higher than working hours for similar graduates in other jobs.
A high workload is a key driver in people’s decision to leave teaching, and those who do leave the profession report having an ‘acceptable workload’ and ‘sufficient control over their workload’ in their new job (page 26).
Administration and lesson planning are key contributors to workload. The report highlights that generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can reduce time spent on lesson planning, without compromising on quality.
Pupil behaviour is ‘one of the fastest-growing contributors to teacher workload since the pandemic’ (page 8)
The report notes that staff want more support from outside agencies to support pupil SEND, mental health and safeguarding needs.
Teaching can’t offer the same home or remote working as other professions, and possibly that’s influencing recruitment and retention.
However, flexible working arrangements such as part-time working, access to ad hoc days off and the opportunity for PPA to be taken at home or elsewhere, ‘can contribute positively to recruitment, retention, wellbeing and job satisfaction’ (page 29).
But, as reported in the Working lives of teachers and leaders survey, teachers also have concerns around flexible working, with a lack of confidence in requesting it and feeling it could harm career progression (for more on this survey, see the Need to Know: How do teachers feel about their working life? ).
Whether that’s likely to happen or not is another story!
‘Data shows that the unfilled vacancy rate for teachers is six times higher than pre-pandemic, while secondary schools have come to rely more heavily on unqualified and non-specialist teachers, especially in schools with more deprived pupil intakes.’ (Teacher Labour Market in England Annual Report 2025)
This difficulty in recruiting impacts on pupils’ classroom experience: ‘the proportion of English and maths teaching hours that are taught by subject specialists is around 10 percentage points lower in the most deprived schools than in the least-deprived’ (report page 5).
The report notes that if the Government wants to improve social mobility, this is an area where action is needed.
