In any given year around 15% of teachers change job and over 20,000 new teachers enter the profession from training routes. Most of this activity occurs in April and May as teachers are obliged to resign by the end of May under standardised terms and conditions.
How is the pandemic affecting this activity? We are working with SchoolDash and The Gatsby Foundation to create a guide to recruitment season. We’ve a raft of data on this (see the full blog for more), but the graph above shows that around 9% of teachers were planning to move but have decided not to, and a further 6% are undecided. This uncertainty is likely to slow vacancy rates and slow the number of candidates looking to change jobs. We have also heard that some schools are reluctant to interview online and so are weighing up options for interim or other supply options where they do currently have vacancies.
We are going to keep monitoring this as we go forward.