The flow of higher qualified new teachers into challenging UK high schools

Abstract

If every child is to have a fairly even chance of a good education, every child must have a fairly even chance of being taught by high-quality teachers. However, high levels of social segregation in UK schools concentrate disadvantaged young people in some schools creating conditions that may deter many teachers. This study investigates whether higher qualified new teachers are deterred from working in challenging schools by examining the average entrance requirements of teachers’ degree subject combined with the university grade teachers achieved of all newly qualified teachers in the UK over three recent years (n = 37,039) and relating these qualifications to the results and socio-economic make-up of schools they sought and found employment. Higher qualified teachers were found to be most attracted to schools with high attainment, next most to those that achieve greater progress, next most to schools with more affluent pupils and least of all to schools that achieve greater progress accounting for pupils’ socio-economic background. Higher qualified new teachers were also found to prefer schools that achieve low progress with affluent pupils to schools that achieve high progress with disadvantaged pupils. Further analysis finds that recruitment imbalances were large as the top quartile highest qualified new teachers were over-represented in higher attaining schools by around a fifth of the new teacher workforce. These results suggest that without steps to increase recruitment of higher qualified teachers into challenging schools, recruitment market forces are likely to prevent challenging schools from being be able to narrow the gap.

keywords:

• teacher recruitment
• teachers’ qualifications
• disadvantaged schools
• educational inequality