Teacher Labour Market in England: Annual Report 2021

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has had profound impacts on society, the economy and on the entire education sector. Teachers' workload, well-being, recruitment and retention have been affected by the national crisis. The aim of the National Foundation for Educational Research's (NFER's) annual series of Teacher Labour Market reports is to monitor the progress the school system in England is making towards meeting the teacher supply challenge by measuring the key indicators and trends of teacher supply and working conditions. This report remains focused on these topics, although it has shifted to analysing new and different datasets to focus on the short-term impacts of the pandemic on the teacher workforce rather than on the longer-running trends. In this report, the authors present new insights on the impact of the pandemic on teachers' well-being, workload, perceived job security and pay. The authors use the Labour Force Survey (LFS), Annual Population Survey (APS) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) COVID-19 surveys to measure changes in the working conditions and well-being of teachers throughout 2020. Crucially, using these household surveys means that they can compare the impact of the pandemic on teachers with the impact on similar individuals in other professions. The authors present data from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) on postgraduate initial teacher training (ITT) applications to explore the impact of the COVID-induced recession on interest in entering teaching. The authors also present new insights from an NFER survey of school leaders, which was conducted in autumn 2020, on their experiences of recruitment and retention during the pandemic. [For the 2020 report, see ED608763.]