Staff Writer Max O’Reilly discusses the STEM teacher shortage currently faced by the UK, looking into its causes and strategies to alleviate it moving forward.
Editor’s Note: This article references a case of suicide, which some readers may find distressing. This article was first published in print on 16 September 2024.
The UK is suffering from a serious teacher shortage in STEM subjects. In computing and mathematics, the number of specialist teacher vacancies has more than tripled since 2010. In the sciences, there has been a sixfold increase. At the same time, the number of pupils in the school system has increased by more than a million. This problem affects subjects beyond just STEM, but in a society ever more reliant on science and technology, it is an extremely worrying trend.
Green investments in areas such as solar and wind farms need engineers and technicians. The government’s plan to build an exascale AI supercomputer in Edinburgh needs programmers and developers. The UK’s growing crop of fusion power startups needs scientists. All these professions begin with STEM teaching in schools, so why is there a growing shortage of STEM teachers?
Why on Earth would anyone want to go into teaching?
The simple fact is that being a teacher is hard. When asked, 57% of lower-secondary school teachers in England said that their workload was unmanageable.
While they are able to take time off for school holidays, during term time most teachers work over 50 hours a week, far higher than the UK average of 33. They spend hours marking work, planning lessons and producing learning materials before and after school. Remarkably, almost half of this work is unpaid; four in ten teachers work up to 26 hours of unpaid overtime every week. What’s more, teaching is a career with few opportunities for flexible working; after all, teaching is done in person every day. As more industries move to embrace working from home, teachers are left behind.
Half of the teachers planning to leave the profession in 2024/25 said they suffered from high levels of stress and exhaustion. This was exemplified by the tragic suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry last year. Following an Ofsted inspection that rated her school as ‘inadequate’, she suffered incredible stress and eventually took her own life.
This was not the first example of Ofsted inspections being extremely stressful for teachers, as school ratings can often have a sizeable impact on house prices in local communities and the career prospects of the teachers working there. Perhaps worst of all, 43% of teachers planning to leave their current school felt that the system they were dedicating so much time and effort to simply did not respect them.
The STEM Recruitment Dearth
If you think that doesn’t sound like a job you’d want to do, you aren’t alone. In 2023, the Department for Education (DfE) recruited only half of the target number of graduates for initial teacher training. That means that there were insufficient new teachers to balance retirements and increasing pupil numbers. In specific STEM subjects, the numbers are even more bleak: the number of new computing teachers met just over a third of its target. In physics, the number was just 17%. Alongside the lack of recruitment, teacher retention has been extremely low, with two in five STEM teachers leaving the profession within just five years of qualifying.
As recruitment and retention remain low, teacher-to-pupil ratios increase every year, reducing the dedicated attention each student receives. The remaining teachers are left with larger workloads and greater stress causing them to eventually leave as well. This is a vicious cycle.
One of the largest drivers of this crisis is funding and salaries. Like many jobs in the public sector, teaching as a profession has been unable to keep up with the pay of private sector industries, especially considering the associated workload and level of stress. Higher salaries and a better work-life balance draw many STEM graduates to jobs outside of teaching. A chemistry graduate in pharmaceuticals or a computer science graduate in software engineering will both make far more money than in a school.
Teaching also requires a great love for a subject, so many of the students most enthused by their field prefer to go into academia and research instead. Many STEM subjects also require specialist equipment for teaching such as computing labs or experiment apparatus. With half of all teachers reporting their school as underfunded and therefore lacking the budget for this equipment, the job of teachers is made even harder.
The Battle for Retention
The government has attempted to combat these problems in different ways. In 2019, the DfE launched its teacher recruitment and retention strategy with four main focus points:
- 1. Reforming Ofsted to reduce stress levels on teachers and allow them to focus on teaching.
- 2. Simplifying the process of becoming a teacher by implementing a one-stop application system.
- 3. Increasing support for early career teachers by creating an early careers framework and introducing financial incentives to improve retention.
- 4. Improving approaches to flexible working and allowing teachers to stay in the classroom while advancing their careers.
The effects of this strategy are hard to measure following the pandemic, as many teachers paused plans to move on due to uncertainty in the job market. However, the number of entrants to teacher training has only decreased since 2020 and large numbers of teachers continue to leave the profession.
Post-pandemic, there has been movement on the core issue of pay. The cost of living crisis prompted calls for teachers to receive inflation-beating pay rises. Following large strike action in 2023, the Conservative government committed to a 6.5% pay rise for teachers. This was to be fully funded by the government rather than being scraped from existing school budgets. More recently, at the end of July 2024, the new Labour government accepted the recommendation of the independent School Teachers’ Review Body to award an additional 5.5% pay rise. Together, these changes make teaching far more competitive against private sector pay offers and will be instrumental in attracting more STEM teachers.
The problem of workload has also been given some attention. Teachers can now do lesson planning at home to allow more flexible working. There has also been a move to alleviate teaching-adjacent bureaucracy to reduce unnecessary work. These changes will not fix the problem but they are a step in the right direction. In 2016, the Independent Teacher Workload Review Group published recommendations to change the way teachers mark students’ work with the aim of reducing workloads. These have been relatively helpful and continued implementation will continue to improve the situation.
The Upshot
While today the UK is a leader in science, with some of the best universities and research bodies in the world, maintaining this position hinges on addressing this crisis in STEM teaching. There are potential future Nobel prize winners in our classrooms right now but without the STEM teachers to spark their passion, the UK risks losing ground to other emerging hubs of scientific learning.
