Improve ethnic diversity in teaching to help achieve 6,500 more teachers

This blog was originally published on Schools Week on Tuesday 10 June.

The Government has pledged to ‘recruit 6,500 more expert teachers’ but not yet communicated much of a concrete plan. A recent National Audit Office report noted that the Department for Education (DfE) ‘assesses its confidence in delivering the pledge as significantly challenging given the fiscal context.’

Given this challenge, the Government should be considering a wide range of low-cost approaches to recruiting and retaining more teachers and improving teacher supply.

Our new research on ethnic disparities in teaching, funded by Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Foundation Mission 44, highlights that improving racial equity could be a vital route to substantially improving recruitment and retention.

At the same time, it would also ensure there are more equal opportunities to access the teaching profession and that it better reflects the diversity of the communities schools serve.

The evidence is clear that teaching, and especially school leadership, does not reflect the ethnic diversity in the working-age population, let alone in the even more diverse school-age population.

However, the ethnic diversity of applicants to teacher training is high, which presents a golden opportunity to increase representation. Despite this, applicants from ethnic minority backgrounds experience higher rejection rates from Initial Teacher Training (ITT) courses then their white counterparts.

If UK-domiciled applicants to postgraduate teacher training from ethnic minority backgrounds were accepted on to training courses at the same rate as their white counterparts, the system would train around 2,000 more teachers per year. Our analysis indicates that some of this gap – up to 600 teachers – is down to other underlying differences in characteristics between teachers in different ethnic groups, such as age, socio-economic background and region.

Also, these ethnic disparities should be interpreted with some caution given limitations with the currently available data. This means it is not possible to ascertain the proportion of applicants that were below the quality standards set by ITT providers (e.g. without qualifications that form a key requirement for entering ITT).

Nonetheless, addressing even a proportion of these disparities would mean more teachers in training and more representative flows of new teachers into the profession.

There are significant ethnic disparities in retention too. Retaining ethnic minority teachers in the state-funded sector at the same rate as their white counterparts could retain an additional 1,000 teachers per year. Again, addressing these disparities would mean both more teachers in schools and a more ethnically representative teacher workforce.

The Government should embrace this agenda as an opportunity for positive change. While many of the levers sit with schools, the DfE can play a more proactive role in encouraging ITT providers, schools and trusts to adopt more inclusive recruitment and retention practices.

The DfE should embed equity, diversity and inclusion within its programme frameworks and within selection criteria for appointing providers, including across ITT, Early Career Framework (ECF), National Professional Qualifications (NPQ) and Teaching School Hubs.

ITT providers and school and trust leaders should audit and evaluate their selection criteria and processes for equity, diversity and inclusion and provide professional development and reflection to improve equity in their attraction and selection processes.

Our research also gives new insights on ethnic disparities in promotion to senior leadership, where ethnic representation is lowest. Teachers from Asian and black ethnic backgrounds have a significantly higher intention to apply for promotion than their white counterparts, even after controlling for differences in their characteristics.

This suggests that the disparities in progression rates found in our previous research were not due to a lack of interest in applying for promotion among ethnic minority teachers and more likely to reflect a lack of opportunity or inequitable treatment in decision-making processes.

School and trust leaders should develop pathways to actively support ethnically diverse teachers who are interested in promotion, such as coaching, shadowing, or promoting leadership training opportunities.

But equality improvements to recruitment and promotion processes must also be accompanied by a genuine commitment to inclusion. School and trust leaders and trustees/ governors should provide on-going support for ethnically diverse leaders to retain them and facilitate continued growth.

It was encouraging to see last week's commitment from the Government to collaborate with Mission 44 as they recruit and retain teachers “that represent the communities they serve”.

Making strides now to reduce ethnic disparities in progression between applicants and teachers of different ethnic groups would support the Government’s goal of increasing the number of teachers in the education system as well as increase quality and – most importantly - equity.