Did teacher numbers increase by 42,000 under Labour?

"Teacher numbers fall by 10,000 in a year in England."

BBC News Website, 25 April 2012

"When Labour was in Government, the number of teachers increased by more than 42,000."

Labour Party Website, 25 April 2012

Yesterday Stephen Twigg, Labour's Shadow Education Secretary, announced that, in the last year, teacher numbers had fallen by 10,000 in England. The BBC also reported this figure.

Mr Twigg contrasted this with the claim that, under Labour, teaching numbers had increased by 42,000.

Analysis

The figure of a 10,000 fall in teacher numbers was taken from the Department of Education's First Statistical Release, published yesterday. The first page of this document says:

"Teacher numbers fell by 10,000 (2%) between November 2010 and November 2011."

The figures are shown in the table below. There were 438,000 full-time equivalent teachers in maintained schools and Academy schools in November 2011 - down from 448,100 teachers in November 2010.

Mr Twigg also claimed that, under Labour, the number of teachers increased by 42,000.

We contacted Mr Twigg's office to about the 42,000 figure and he directed us to a statement made by Balls when he Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families which backs up his claim:

"Over the past 12 years, our education system has been rebuilt on foundations of inspirational teaching, great school leadership and sustained record investment.

We have now almost 3,500 Sure Start children's centres compared to none in 1997, nearly 4,000 schools have been rebuilt or refurbished, per pupil funding has more than doubled and over 42,000 more teachers and 212,000 more support staff have been recruited."

We tried to find this figure ourselves from the Department of Education but unfortunately they do not compile data on long term trends in teacher numbers.

Therefore we have produced this graph using two separate reports, one produced in 2009 from the Office for National Statistics on the school workforce in England, and one produced in 2012 from the Department for Education on the same topic.

Together they contain data on the total number of teachers in 1997 and 2000-2010. While this is not an ideal solution it does show the broad trend in teacher numbers during most of Labour's time in office:

This graph shows that the number of teachers increased from 400,300 in 1997 to 448,000 in 2010 - an increase of 48,000. However this figure includes numbers before Labour came to power and excludes figures at the end of their time in office. So while it is not the same as Mr Twigg's claim, we can reasonably rely on its broad accuracy.

Conclusion

Mr Twigg's claim that the number of teachers has fallen by 10,000 in the last year is accurate and is backed up by figures from the Department of Education.

His claim that, under Labour, teaching numbers rose by 42,000 is supported by a statement made by Ed Balls in parliament when he was a minister.

However, figures from the Department for Education do not obviously show this figure, and we have contacted them to confirm the statistic. It is however likely to be broadly in line with the evidence we were able to gather.