Latest news with #teacherShortage
Sky News
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Sky News
Department for Education 'lacks coherent plan' to address teacher shortage
Why you can trust Sky News The Department for Education (DfE) has come under fire from MPs over its handling of England's worsening teacher shortage. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has said DfE "lacks a coherent plan" to deliver the government's flagship recruitment pledge. In a new report, PAC warns that schools and further education colleges are struggling with rising vacancy rates, while the government's promise to recruit 6,500 new teachers by 2029 remains vague and uncosted. The committee says DfE has failed to explain how this figure was calculated or how progress will be measured, especially when colleges alone are expected to need up to 12,400 more teachers by 2028. There is still "no baseline, no milestones, and no clarity" on how the pledge aligns with the scale of current shortages, the committee warned. PAC chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said: "The government is essentially flying blind, without a clear plan, the pledge risks being meaningless." The MP called for urgent action to ensure that staffing shortfalls, particularly in disadvantaged areas and key subjects, do not jeopardise pupils' education. The report reveals that 46% of secondary schools in England reported at least one teaching vacancy during the last academic year. It comes despite £700m being allocated annually to recruitment and retention initiatives, excluding pay and pensions. The committee found little evidence that the government has properly evaluated its programmes, especially non-financial initiatives like wellbeing, flexible working, or behaviour support. The situation is particularly bleak in schools serving disadvantaged communities, where teachers are more likely to leave, and subject gaps are more pronounced. Nearly one-third of these schools do not offer computer science A-level due to a lack of trained staff. This is a stark contrast to wealthier areas, where such subjects are far more accessible. 7:37 Reacting to the report, Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), said: "It is heartening to see the PAC really get to grips with the serious challenge around teacher numbers and subject specialists. "English schools and colleges are in the midst of the worst teacher recruitment and retention crisis in a generation, created by long hours, poor pay and Ofsted." 4:12 Workload and pupil behaviour were cited as key factors pushing experienced teachers out of the profession. The government's own wellbeing charter has so far gained limited traction, with just 17% of schools and colleges signing up. PAC is now calling on DfE to publish a full delivery plan, with measurable milestones and regular updates to parliament, to track progress on recruitment and retention across both schools and colleges. A DfE spokesperson said: "This government is already delivering on our pledge to recruit and retain 6,500 more talented teachers with 2,300 more secondary and special schoolteachers in classrooms this year, as well as 1,300 fewer teachers leaving the profession - one of the lowest leave rates since 2010. "Since day one, the education secretary has worked to reset the relationship with the education sector, announcing pay awards of almost 10% over two years and committed to tackle high workload and poor wellbeing including encouraging schools to offer more flexible working opportunities. "We are committed to working with teachers as partners in the push for better, driving high and rising standards through our Plan for Change to enable every child to achieve and thrive."
Irish Times
07-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
The Irish Times view on the shortage of teachers: education is being compromised
At first glance, it appears to be a paradox: despite record numbers of qualified teachers working across the country, schools report increasingly severe challenges in filling vacancies. Almost all primary schools, for example, had to employ unqualified individuals without teaching qualifications as substitutes in the past year. At second level, one in five schools say they were forced to drop subjects due to teacher shortages. On Monday came confirmation of the scale of the issue : more than 1,800 teaching posts were left vacant across schools last March, according to Department of Education data, up from around 1,600 last November. Yet, 79,000 qualified teachers were employed during the past academic year – the highest number on record. The pipeline of teaching graduates continues to be strong, with 3,700 newly qualified teachers registered last year. Teaching remains an attractive career choice, with high demand among CAO applicants for both primary and post-primary education courses. So what is going on? At its heart, the teacher shortage is not just a workforce problem – it is a housing problem. It is no coincidence that most of the schools reporting serious recruitment difficulties are located in the capital and commuter belt areas, where accommodation is both scarce and prohibitively expensive. Young teachers, particularly those newly qualified and on the lower end of pay scales, are increasingly priced out of living near where they are needed most. In response, Minister for Education Helen McEntee has extended temporary measures aimed at boosting teacher supply. These include allowing teachers to provide additional substitution cover and lifting restrictions for job-sharing teachers. Further measures are planned, such as faster access to permanent contracts for young teachers. While helpful, these are sticking plasters. They do not address the deeper issue: a chronic lack of affordable housing. READ MORE The programme for government has pledged to build more affordable homes and to earmark cost-rental units for key public sector workers, including teachers. In theory, this would allow young professionals to live closer to their work. Progress, however, has been sluggish. The State missed its target for delivery of social housing delivery last year by nearly 20 per cent. While the number of cost-rental units doubled to over 1,200 last year, it remains a drop in the ocean. Ultimately, teacher shortages will persist unless the Government takes decisive action to increase the supply of affordable housing. When children's education is compromised – through cancelled classes, lost subjects and a lack of qualified staff – the cost is borne by the next generation. We must do better by our pupils. They deserve experienced teachers, consistent support and the full breadth of educational opportunity.
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Teacher shortages persisted this school year. What's being done to fill the gap for the next?
For several months this year, Katherine Korakakis' kids had substitute instructors that were "not qualified to teach the subject," said the Montreal parent, whose province started this school year thousands of teachers short. "It wasn't a math teacher who was teaching math. It wasn't a French teacher who was teaching French." She was already worried about learning loss after the pandemic, and scrambled to get her teens extra tutoring, a luxury she knows not everyone can afford. "Having a child score in the high 90s … one year in math and then having a non-qualified teacher coming in the second year and the child scoring a 50 — there's something wrong here," she said. Teacher shortages have become an issue in nearly every province and territory. Kids facing one substitute teacher after another. French taught by a non-speaker. Relying on uncertified adults to supervise classrooms. While some governments suggest an aging workforce and growing populations are behind the shortages, teachers themselves point to working conditions. So what's being done to improve the situation for next year? 'Just getting through the day' In Surrey, B.C., Anne Whitmore noted that in her children' 17-class elementary school, four teachers were on leave as the school year concluded. Whenever a classroom teacher was away, her kids said, they sometimes got a substitute for part of the day, but also likely saw another class's teacher, the librarian, the music instructor and the principal fill in. "How do you learn in an environment where you have no continuity?" Whitmore asked. "They're trying to scramble and have some kind of educational content, but really they're just getting through the day." Constantly backfilling others leaves fellow teachers, support staffers, guidance counsellors and administrators delaying their own responsibilities to students, "who now don't have access to those adults when they need them," said Brampton, Ont., high school science teacher Jason Bradshaw. Alison Osborne, who served as president of the Ontario Principals' Council this year, describes the situation as the worst she's seen in her 17 years as a principal, with administrators "constantly monitoring our phones just to see what the situation we're going to be walking into the next day," she said. What's influencing shortages? The overall number of educators in K-12 public schools rose slightly — around three per cent — from 401,286 in 2018-2019 to 413,667 in 2022-2023, according to Statistics Canada, but depending on the region, the figures have wavered during that period. CBC News asked each provincial and territorial ministry of education about teacher shortages, with B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and New Brunswick responding. Some cited retirement of an aging workforce and rapid population growth as key factors influencing current shortages. Limited housing and a higher cost of living have perennially kept more teachers from certain regions, including remote and rural areas, said Clint Johnston, president designate of the Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF), the national group representing the unions of more than 365,000 K-12 teachers and education workers. Yet Johnston says today's working conditions are what's behind current shortages, as teachers bail on the traditional 30-to-35-year teaching careers. "There's a lot of certified individuals in most of our provinces and territories, but … they're not sticking with it," Johnston said from Vancouver. "There's not enough support workers. There's not enough teachers … everyone's workload has gone up and become untenable." An online CTF survey last fall drew nearly 5,000 responses from Canadian teachers, education workers and principals. While not statistically representative of the 365,000 educators represented by its members unions, those who chose to respond paint a difficult picture. Nearly 80 per cent of respondents reported struggling to cope, 55 per cent had experienced violence or aggression over the year prior and 77 per cent called students' needs "significantly more complex" than five years earlier. The constant pivoting educators were forced into during COVID-19 also took a toll, says science teacher Bradshaw. Given that a key pandemic lesson was to take better care of ourselves, "that can mean stepping away from stressful work … where you feel you're being overextended." Job 'isn't worth the conditions that we're facing' Some areas are struggling to attract young people to the field, with even brand new teachers experiencing burnout. Having found engineering work isolating after obtaining a bachelor's in biology, Jadine Kirst chose to become a teacher instead since she loved working with kids, felt inspired by lifelong educators she knew and saw the need for more teachers. Her enthusiasm quickly evaporated, however, after just one year teaching Grade 8 in a francophone school in New Brunswick. "We had students figuring out loopholes so that they could look at pornography on their in-class iPads. We had a few students who threatened my life — one of [whom] needed to have their locker searched for weapons," she said. Once, asking a student to stop talking mid-lesson sparked a barrage of insults and profanity, with Krist feeling "futile" as she tried to calm his screaming. "I couldn't call the principal; the principal was probably too busy dealing with other students," she said, recalling feeling alone, without any recourse and worn down. She still works in education, but no longer in the classroom. "People who aren't aware of the reality today still look at teaching as an excellent job with two months off and a great pension, but it isn't worth the conditions that we're facing." What's being done about shortages Several ministries of education that responded to CBC News' queries noted ongoing efforts to address the problem, including: Funding programs for rural and remote teacher candidates to train in their home communities (B.C. and Alberta). Ontario and New Brunswick are allowing teachers' colleges to accept more students, while several regions have also floated the idea of accelerating or condensing teacher training, including in Ontario (which had initially doubled the length of study a decade ago to stem a vast supply of new teachers outstripping jobs available for them). Streamlining educator training is of course possible, says Brock University professor David Hutchison, yet he thinks it would likely cut into the invaluable time aspiring teachers spend inside real schools. He also predicts a negative impact to the parts of teacher training that were added more recently, for instance about student mental health, use of technology and artificial intelligence, or teaching students whose first language isn't English or French. "These are the new realities of being a student in Ontario and other provinces as well and we have an obligation to prepare [new teachers]," he said. While Ontario principal Osborne welcomes any effort to entice people to education, she worries whether they'd stick around without real change to classroom conditions. "When we talk about recruiting new teachers, new education workers, I'm not sure it's always an appealing environment to work in," she said. Science teacher Bradshaw wants to see deeper, ongoing investment versus short-term fixes. "If [governments] want to show teachers that they are valued and respected and give people a reason to come into … and stay in this profession, we have to know that they're going to invest in us long term," he said, including pay that keeps up with inflation (versus sign-on bonuses) and increased mobility, since where a teacher starts may not be where they want to stay. What do aspiring teachers think? "Knowing that teachers are needed everywhere is awesome," said teacher-candidate Serzna Issadien, who's nearing the end of a Brock University program mixing an undergraduate degree with a bachelor's of education. Still, she's uneasy about initiatives that may "just flood the market with more teachers" without adequate training, given the chaotic reality she's already seen, having filled in as an emergency substitute in the St. Catharines, Ont., region. Bridgette Walpole, another teacher-candidate close to completing her Brock training, is eager to dive into her dream profession despite a belief that most don't really understand the job nor the mix of classroom challenges today. "From a student's perspective, you see [teachers] handing out assessments. You see them standing at the front of the class delivering content," she said. "You don't see them creating the actual materials for each and every student that learns in a bunch of different ways. You don't understand the many different hats that they wear…. You're really everyone all at once."
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Teacher shortages persisted this school year. What's being done to fill the gap for the next?
For several months this year, Katherine Korakakis' kids had substitute instructors that were "not qualified to teach the subject," said the Montreal parent, whose province started this school year thousands of teachers short. "It wasn't a math teacher who was teaching math. It wasn't a French teacher who was teaching French." She was already worried about learning loss after the pandemic, and scrambled to get her teens extra tutoring, a luxury she knows not everyone can afford. "Having a child score in the high 90s … one year in math and then having a non-qualified teacher coming in the second year and the child scoring a 50 — there's something wrong here," she said. Teacher shortages have become an issue in nearly every province and territory. Kids facing one substitute teacher after another. French taught by a non-speaker. Relying on uncertified adults to supervise classrooms. While some governments suggest an aging workforce and growing populations are behind the shortages, teachers themselves point to working conditions. So what's being done to improve the situation for next year? 'Just getting through the day' In Surrey, B.C., Anne Whitmore noted that in her children' 17-class elementary school, four teachers were on leave as the school year concluded. Whenever a classroom teacher was away, her kids said, they sometimes got a substitute for part of the day, but also likely saw another class's teacher, the librarian, the music instructor and the principal fill in. "How do you learn in an environment where you have no continuity?" Whitmore asked. "They're trying to scramble and have some kind of educational content, but really they're just getting through the day." Constantly backfilling others leaves fellow teachers, support staffers, guidance counsellors and administrators delaying their own responsibilities to students, "who now don't have access to those adults when they need them," said Brampton, Ont., high school science teacher Jason Bradshaw. Alison Osborne, who served as president of the Ontario Principals' Council this year, describes the situation as the worst she's seen in her 17 years as a principal, with administrators "constantly monitoring our phones just to see what the situation we're going to be walking into the next day," she said. What's influencing shortages? The overall number of educators in K-12 public schools rose slightly — around three per cent — from 401,286 in 2018-2019 to 413,667 in 2022-2023, according to Statistics Canada, but depending on the region, the figures have wavered during that period. CBC News asked each provincial and territorial ministry of education about teacher shortages, with B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and New Brunswick responding. Some cited retirement of an aging workforce and rapid population growth as key factors influencing current shortages. WATCH | How teacher shortages came to 'a crisis point': Limited housing and a higher cost of living have perennially kept more teachers from certain regions, including remote and rural areas, said Clint Johnston, president designate of the Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF), the national group representing the unions of more than 365,000 K-12 teachers and education workers. Yet Johnston says today's working conditions are what's behind current shortages, as teachers bail on the traditional 30-to-35-year teaching careers. "There's a lot of certified individuals in most of our provinces and territories, but … they're not sticking with it," Johnston said from Vancouver. "There's not enough support workers. There's not enough teachers … everyone's workload has gone up and become untenable." An online CTF survey last fall drew nearly 5,000 responses from Canadian teachers, education workers and principals. While not statistically representative of the 365,000 educators represented by its members unions, those who chose to respond paint a difficult picture. Nearly 80 per cent of respondents reported struggling to cope, 55 per cent had experienced violence or aggression over the year prior and 77 per cent called students' needs "significantly more complex" than five years earlier. The constant pivoting educators were forced into during COVID-19 also took a toll, says science teacher Bradshaw. Given that a key pandemic lesson was to take better care of ourselves, "that can mean stepping away from stressful work … where you feel you're being overextended." Job 'isn't worth the conditions that we're facing' Some areas are struggling to attract young people to the field, with even brand new teachers experiencing burnout. Having found engineering work isolating after obtaining a bachelor's in biology, Jadine Kirst chose to become a teacher instead since she loved working with kids, felt inspired by lifelong educators she knew and saw the need for more teachers. Her enthusiasm quickly evaporated, however, after just one year teaching Grade 8 in a francophone school in New Brunswick. "We had students figuring out loopholes so that they could look at pornography on their in-class iPads. We had a few students who threatened my life — one of [whom] needed to have their locker searched for weapons," she said. Once, asking a student to stop talking mid-lesson sparked a barrage of insults and profanity, with Krist feeling "futile" as she tried to calm his screaming. "I couldn't call the principal; the principal was probably too busy dealing with other students," she said, recalling feeling alone, without any recourse and worn down. She still works in education, but no longer in the classroom. "People who aren't aware of the reality today still look at teaching as an excellent job with two months off and a great pension, but it isn't worth the conditions that we're facing." WATCH | Teachers' federation leader on past classroom challenges on his mind 'to this day': What's being done about shortages Several ministries of education that responded to CBC News' queries noted ongoing efforts to address the problem, including: Funding programs for rural and remote teacher candidates to train in their home communities (B.C. and Alberta). Ontario and New Brunswick are allowing teachers' colleges to accept more students, while several regions have also floated the idea of accelerating or condensing teacher training, including in Ontario (which had initially doubled the length of study a decade ago to stem a vast supply of new teachers outstripping jobs available for them). Streamlining educator training is of course possible, says Brock University professor David Hutchison, yet he thinks it would likely cut into the invaluable time aspiring teachers spend inside real schools. He also predicts a negative impact to the parts of teacher training that were added more recently, for instance about student mental health, use of technology and artificial intelligence, or teaching students whose first language isn't English or French. "These are the new realities of being a student in Ontario and other provinces as well and we have an obligation to prepare [new teachers]," he said. While Ontario principal Osborne welcomes any effort to entice people to education, she worries whether they'd stick around without real change to classroom conditions. "When we talk about recruiting new teachers, new education workers, I'm not sure it's always an appealing environment to work in," she said. Science teacher Bradshaw wants to see deeper, ongoing investment versus short-term fixes. "If [governments] want to show teachers that they are valued and respected and give people a reason to come into … and stay in this profession, we have to know that they're going to invest in us long term," he said, including pay that keeps up with inflation (versus sign-on bonuses) and increased mobility, since where a teacher starts may not be where they want to stay. What do aspiring teachers think? "Knowing that teachers are needed everywhere is awesome," said teacher-candidate Serzna Issadien, who's nearing the end of a Brock University program mixing an undergraduate degree with a bachelor's of education. Still, she's uneasy about initiatives that may "just flood the market with more teachers" without adequate training, given the chaotic reality she's already seen, having filled in as an emergency substitute in the St. Catharines, Ont., region. Bridgette Walpole, another teacher-candidate close to completing her Brock training, is eager to dive into her dream profession despite a belief that most don't really understand the job nor the mix of classroom challenges today. "From a student's perspective, you see [teachers] handing out assessments. You see them standing at the front of the class delivering content," she said. "You don't see them creating the actual materials for each and every student that learns in a bunch of different ways. You don't understand the many different hats that they wear…. You're really everyone all at once."
New York Times
11-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Gen Z Is Barely Holding On to the American Dream
Elizabeth Swan is a teacher. Her dad was a teacher. Her aunt was a teacher. 'I went to school to teach during a time we were told, 'There's a teacher shortage. You will always have a job and be in high demand.' And that has simply not been true,' Swan, a 27-year-old Illinois resident, told me. She is licensed to teach middle and high school history and social studies yet has been able to find only a substitute position that pays her $32,000 a year. She's in a long-term relationship with a software engineer, and they each live with their families in the south suburbs of Chicago. Swan's American dream, she said, is to be 'debt free, unafraid of homelessness, not fearing lack of insurance. And perhaps the dream that public education remains alive, so I can have a job.' Ideally, she would like to get married and have kids, but she feels she needs to move out on her own before that happens, which right now feels impossible. 'Even the worst place is still going to be, like, $1,300 for a one-bedroom. It feels almost insane,' she said. Swan wants to be able to provide things like summer camp for her future kids and to stay solvent even if someone has a major medical issue or some other unavoidable blip. Over the past few weeks I have read almost 200 reader responses to my prompt to members of Gen Z about what they're thinking about their futures. I asked them about how they saw their career prospects, the future of homeownership, what they thought about family formation and what retirement could look like. I wanted to talk to young people in this moment because so much seems in flux. I wondered: Do they embrace the earlier vision — house, steady job, kids, the white picket fence of it all — or do they want to tear it all down and go full YOLO nihilist? While I can't claim the responses to my call-out are a gold standard, nationally representative study, they offered a good deal of situational, gender and geographic diversity. I followed up over the phone with a dozen respondents — the ones who seemed especially thoughtful, and whose stories echoed major trends that I picked up in the responses, which are backed up by economic data. While they might be remaking the dream around the edges — for example, thinking about buying property with friends instead of with a spouse — the Gen Z respondents I spoke to still wanted most of the old dream (get married, buy a house, have kids — not necessarily in that order); they just didn't think they could achieve it. Almost none of them thought they would be better off than their parents, even if they described themselves as coming from generational poverty. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
