FE Teaching Workforce Salary Comparison Research

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Recruitment and retention in the further education (FE) workforce is a significant challenge and evidence on this subject is scant. While there are challenges across the workforce, they are particularly acute in the Construction and the Built Environment, Digital, and Engineering and Manufacturing sectors.

The study aims to:

  • better understand the impact that pay has on recruitment and retention of teaching staff within the three identified sectors across three contrasting regions (the North East, South East and West Midlands) in order to determine whether challenges are greater in some geographies and/or subject fields
  • develop a replicable process that can be used across other subject fields and/or geographies.

The study will take a two-stage approach. This will include gathering qualitative data from FE colleges to identify the industry occupations that staff have come from or moved to, as well as explore recruitment and retention more broadly. The list of comparator occupations from this stage will feed into secondary data analysis to explore differences between FE teaching salaries and comparable roles in industry.