“We welcome the fact that the government recognises the need to get more specialist teachers into the classroom. The recruitment and retention system is badly broken, with the majority of schools and colleges suffering from teacher shortages. Bursaries and scholarships may be helpful in some areas, but it is hard to see how they will turn the tide of this crisis on their own.
“Improving pay and conditions across the whole of the profession, in all roles and subject areas, must be the way forward. Continuing to boost salaries in order to reverse years of real-terms pay erosion, achieving parity of pay between different parts of the sector and ensuring schools and colleges have the funding they need to pay their staff, are key to attracting recruits and then retaining them. We also need to see more sustained action to address workload issues, including lowering the excessive pressures of Ofsted inspections and performance tables. It is only with change of this scale that we can hope to ease such long-standing recruitment and retention problems.”