Educator's Corner Ep 6: The Global Teacher Recruitment Crisis (part 1) - Looming Challenge or Opportunity for Innovation?

**Kai Vacher** (0:07)
Hello, and welcome to the Educator's Corner Podcast, the show that brings you conversations with educators from all over the world. Conversations where we stay curious for just a little bit longer. Conversations where we're talking about the challenges and the opportunities which we are facing in our schools and in our communities. So, whether you're walking, running, cooking, or just relaxing, I hope that you're ready for a compelling conversation with today's guest, Mark Steed. Mark has 22 years of experience of leading top UK and international not-for-profit schools as both principal and CEO. And Mark now supports school groups, schools, and school leaders in a number of areas, particularly related to mergers and acquisitions, new school ventures, whole school strategy, digital strategy, transformation and cyber security. So Mark, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

**Mark Steed** (1:12)
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me on.

**Kai Vacher** (1:14)
Well, I'm delighted that we found space in our diaries that we could have this conversation.
And so up until summer 2023, you'd been a head teacher for 22 years. That's quite a remarkable feat. Now, what we do here when we're speaking to our colleagues who have gone into retirement, that actually head teachers can find retirement quite difficult. How are you finding life after Headship, Mark?

**Mark Steed** (1:48)
Well, it isn't retirement. I've set up our own company and we're really enjoying doing that. And it's nice to be working with schools. So we've set up Steed Education as a consultancy business with the aim of supporting school leaders in a whole range of ways. I love the variety of it.
It's great being able to work from home a lot of the time, but it's also wonderful to be in school. I've been in school for the past couple of days and it's just been lovely going into school lunch and seeing people and having on-site meetings and doing work on-site is still get a great buzz from that. So I think it's great fun and I'm enjoying lots of bits of the job. Obviously, it's very different. I'm not managing lots of people and obviously, I haven't got direct responsibility for students anymore, but it's great to still be involved.

**Kai Vacher** (2:45)
Brilliant and fantastic to see you smiling and looking so well.
So today, we're going to be talking about the teacher recruitment crisis and whether this is actually a looming crisis or maybe is it a wonderful opportunity for innovation. So let's jump straight in Mark and let's explore the first elements of this crisis. Let's look at the data and I'm just going to read out a few facts first of all, just to get us into the groove here of this issue. So let's start with England first of all. This year, England faces a significant shortfall in the number of training teachers, with only 13,102 out of a targeted 26,360 registering for secondary teacher training places available. Those figures from the Department of Education. And it would seem on current trends, probably at least a third of those trainees are likely to leave the profession by 2030 If we then expand out further into the international sector, where I am currently working and Mark, where I think you spent the last eight years of your career as a head teacher, in the international sector, in the next four years, so by 2028, according to ISC research, we're going to need another 158,400 teachers in the next four years. And then if we zoom out even further and look at all education systems around the world, according to UNESCO, by 2030, we're going to need 44 million additional teachers globally. So it would seem that we have a situation where as some of us in our schools, we are struggling to recruit teachers, or if we're not struggling at the moment, we're at least worrying at a point fairly near in the future where we are going to struggle. So Mark, in your experience, that's the data, but is there a crisis? How is this impacting on schools on a day-to-day basis, would you say?

**Mark Steed** (5:07)
I think it's definitely impacting on schools. I mean, if you take the situation in England, I don't think we've had a majority of physics lessons being taught by a specialist physics graduate for something like 10 years. Really, acute crisis in physics, in mathematics. So we've got non-specialists having to flex across biologists typically teaching physics up to GCSE, non-mathematicians being brought in to teach mathematics.
So it isn't just a total numbers game. There's a different picture. I mean, there's lots of PE teachers, there's lots of classics teachers if you look at DFE data. But we have a massive shortage in the sciences, mathematics, economics, and business particularly. These are very, very difficult to get qualified teachers who have actually got the experience and the ability to teach A-level. So I think there is a real crisis, and then as you've pointed out Kai, I mean, going abroad, a lot of people moving abroad, the massive expansion of British and English-speaking education around the world, huge demand for English-speaking education, lots of opportunities to travel there, but it is again, exacerbating the situation and there's a massive shortage. I think the big issue for international schools is supply, supply in terms of where the next generation of teachers is going to come from. And what do we do when teachers are ill? And how are we going to, where do we get that in that sense of supply? How do we get supply teachers?