Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nicholas Brown on 2014-04-25.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what proportion of teachers who have qualified in the last 10 years have left the teaching profession within (a) two, (b) five and (c) 10 years; and what steps he is taking to encourage greater teacher retention.

Mr David Laws

The following table provides the proportion of full and part-time teachers that qualified in the stated year, entered service in the publicly funded sector in England the year after and were no longer in such service two, five and ten years later. It is not known whether the teachers who are recorded as out of service have left service permanently or are teaching in another country or sector of education.

Year qualified1	Newly qualified entrants entering service2	Year entered service3	Out of service 2 years later	Out of service 5 years later	Out of service 10 years later4
2000	17,400	2000-01	15%	27%	34%
2005	26,000	2005-06	15%	22%
2008	25,000	2008-09	14%

Source: Database of Teacher Records (DTR)

1 Calendar year in which the teachers qualified.

2 Teachers in part-time service are under-recorded on the DTR by between 10% and 20% and therefore these figures may be underestimated.

3 Financial year during which the teachers entered service.

4 The length of service may not have been continuous; for example not all of those shown as teaching 10 years after entering service in 1997-98 may have taught continuously for 10 years, some may have taken periods of time outside of the maintained sector.

The Government is committed to making teaching a profession which can attract and retain the very best people. We are taking every possible step to reduce the amount of central prescription and bureaucracy placed on teachers, freeing them up to act as autonomous professionals. And we are giving headteachers more flexibility to recruit, train and retain the best teachers, including through new school-based training programmes and greater pay flexibility which will allow heads to ensure that high-performing teachers are rewarded appropriately.

Teacher vacancy rates continue to remain low and have been around 1% or below (of all teaching posts) since 2000. In November 2013 there were 750 vacancies for full-time permanent teachers in state-funded schools – a rate of 0.2%.