A “dogfight” is brewing between schools that have capacity to “grow their own” apprentice teachers and those that don’t have the expertise, time or money, an expert has warned.
And a school leader has raised fears that the barriers facing schools in taking on postgraduate apprentices will be “supercharged” when a similar government scheme for undergraduates kicks off.
Speaking at a Tes webinar on the recruitment crisis facing schools, Professor Geraint Jones, founding executive director of the National Institute of Teaching and Education, said more leaders needed to be aware that they can spend the apprenticeship levy on a postgraduate teaching apprentice.
But some schools could be put off owing to “capacity and time”, and the “not insignificant” effort required to “grow your own talent”, he said.
“I think it’ll be a little bit more of a dogfight between schools who prioritise leadership time on growing their own and putting on huge professional development programmes,” he added.
The warnings come after a report by the National Foundation for Educational Research predicted that the government is set to miss its teacher trainee recruitment target for the second year in a row at a time when teacher vacancies are rising higher than ever in secondary schools.
And they follow warnings from leaders that schools are desperately trying to retain staff as teaching vacancies become increasingly difficult to fill.
In March, Tes revealed that secondary school job vacancies had soared to their highest levels for at least six years and showed “no sign of slowing”.
Barriers facing postgraduates could apply to undergraduates as well
Earlier this year, the government confirmed that it is currently developing a new undergraduate teaching degree apprenticeship.
But Vic Goddard, co-principal at Passmores Academy, is concerned that the current barriers facing schools that wish to take part in the postgraduate apprenticeship scheme will become “supercharged” when the new undergraduate version launches.
He said having to teach a trainee teacher the content as well as how to deliver it is a “two-stage process”, making it “more complicated and more time consuming”.
Mr Goddard said that to really maximise the opportunities with both postgraduate and undergraduate apprenticeships, the issue of capacity in the system needed to be fixed first.
The postgraduate teaching apprenticeship, which got under way in 2018, allows trainee teachers to learn on the job without paying tuition fees, and also allows candidates to receive a salary.
However, in order to undertake a postgraduate teaching apprenticeship, candidates must have had suitable experience teaching, for example, working as a teaching assistant.
Of the 23,224 trainee teachers recruited last year, just 3 per cent of the postgraduate new entrants to initial teacher training (ITT) for 2022-23 came from a postgraduate apprenticeship route, the same as the previous year, according to government figures.
But while there are fewer applications to teacher training through the apprenticeship route, the percentage of successful applications through this route is significantly lower than others.
Just 15 per cent of applications to train to teach through the postgraduate teaching apprenticeship were successful last year.
James Noble-Rogers, executive director of the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers, said that ITT providers “might be more willing to offer School Direct salaried programmes because they carry less risk” of losing a portion of their funding if a trainee decides not to continue their apprenticeship with them.
Like the School Direct route, apprenticeship trainees gain their qualified teacher status (QTS) after nine months but then have to do a further three months to officially pass the apprenticeship, even though they already have QTS.
“If a teacher decides not to bother with the final three months, or moves somewhere else to get a teaching post, the apprenticeship provider (which has to be an accredited ITT provider) loses a proportion of its funding. The new teacher doesn’t lose out because they have the QTS,” Mr Noble-Rogers said.
Professor Jones said that the pool of eligible candidates for a postgraduate teaching apprenticeship was also smaller from the outset than tuition-fee routes, where you are “not required to have experience of teaching”.
Teaching apprenticeships a ‘loss’ for leaders
Glyn Potts, headteacher of Newman Catholic College in Greater Manchester, said his school had been running the postgraduate apprenticeship routes for a number of years.
He said that one of the problems with the scheme is the lower return on investment for schools. Apprentices only work in the school four days a week, and carry additional costs for tutoring and mentoring.
Mr Potts said this means a leader has to consider if a particular candidate is “worth that investment”, especially as a teaching apprentice wage is at a similar level to a qualified early career teacher.
Pepe Di’Iasio, headteacher of Wales High School in Rotherham, said that the difficulties attracting teachers mean that individual schools and small academy trusts are at a disadvantage.
He said he worries that the “agenda around multi-academy trusts (MATS) is used as a reason” to encourage more schools to join, but added that it was “easy to see that in a MAT, you’ve got more opportunities to recruit on a bigger scale”.
He added that it was not just about the money but also about “attracting the right calibre of candidates to want to enter the profession through a number of different routes”.
Michael Tidd, primary school headteacher of East Preston Junior School, said that while there were examples of some stand-alone academies and small schools getting involved with postgraduate apprenticeships, the “direction of travel seems to be that more things end up centralised”.
Government failure underlined
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the union would be “surprised” if many schools and trusts had not “already been thinking about and implementing a range of approaches to recruit, develop and retain teachers over the past few years in an effort to offset the national shortage”.
“Their capacity to do this will be constrained by the amount of funding that is available and, given that funding is extremely tight and financial circumstances vary greatly, that capacity is limited and variable.”
Mr Barton added that the “underlying problem is that, at a national level, too few people are becoming teachers and too many then leave early in their careers. The government must improve pay and address the systemic issues which drive unsustainable workload pressures.”
