Teacher shortages have worsened in England following the COVID-19 pandemic partly because the profession offers relatively limited opportunities to work from home, a new report has said.
According to the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), the number of teacher vacancies posted by schools was 93 percent higher in the academic year up to February 2023 than at the same point in the year before the pandemic.
The data on teacher vacancies, collected by teacher job board and data scraping service TeachVac, also suggests that vacancies in February 2023 were 37 percent higher than at the same point in the 2021/22 school year.
Teacher vacancies do not only reflect teachers who leave the profession as schools may post vacancies to fill posts left by teachers who moved schools or because there is a higher demand for staff driven by increased pupil numbers….