What does the pledge mean? 

Labour’s manifesto states: “We will get more teachers into shortage subjects, support areas that face recruitment challenges, and tackle retention issues.”

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said that the government was aiming to achieve the specific target of recruiting an additional 6,500 new teachers “over the course of the parliament”.

Education is a devolved matter, so we assume the pledge refers to state-funded schools in England, which fall within the control of the Westminster government.

Some key questions about how progress against this pledge will be measured remain unanswered, however.

The government has not said what its target of recruiting 6,500 new teachers will be benchmarked against—that is, what figure will serve as the baseline against which to measure progress. 

It’s also unclear which “key subjects” teachers will be recruited for, or whether specific recruitment targets will be set for certain specialist subjects or other areas like special educational needs. We don’t know whether the 6,500 teachers will be measured by headcount or full-time equivalent (FTE) roles, whether the teachers will be for secondary schools only (as has been reported) and whether the target involves only newly qualified teachers, or includes teachers returning to the profession.

We put many of these questions to the Department for Education in November 2024 but it declined to comment.

What progress has been made?

On 8 July, the department announced that it would relaunch and “expand” its main teacher recruitment campaign, “Every Lesson Shapes a Life”, as part of its efforts to recruit an additional 6,500 new teachers.

The government publishes annual data on the number of school teachers based on the School Workforce Census, which is conducted each November. This means we don’t yet have any data on how the school workforce has changed since Labour was elected in July.

The headline figures refer to FTE staff, which the government says “best reflects the varied working patterns that the workforce may have”.

These figures show that in the 2023/24 academic year, on a FTE basis there were 468,693 teachers working in state-funded schools in England. On a headcount basis there were 513,900 teachers.

This data also includes figures on the number of new entrants, which show that in 2023/24 44,000 teachers joined the state-funded school sector (a 3,900 decrease compared to the previous year), of whom approximately 17,500 were newly qualified teachers. After factoring in leavers and changes in working hours, the overall number of FTE teachers increased by 300 in 2023/24 compared to the previous year.

The government also publishes data showing the number of secondary school teachers by subject taught, but again, this data currently only goes up to the 2023/24 academic year.

Data is also available for the number of new entrants to Initial Teacher Training in England. These figures show the number of people beginning training to become a qualified teacher, but it’s worth noting that not all of these people may ultimately end up joining the state school workforce.