SCHOOLS with staff shortages should be able to offer competitive salaries to allow them to attract teachers, according to a select committee of MPs.

Their report, Secondary education: teacher recruitment and retention, calls for a new grade of highly paid “superteachers” who would help to raise standards and solve the problem of teacher shortages.

“Markets do work. If we have shortages, why shouldn’t we be able to pay extra money to get teachers?” asks Barry Sheerman, the Labour chair of the Education Select Committee, in The Times Educational Supplement (Sept 24).

But Chris Keates, of the teaching union NASUWT, says that the committee’s proposals are “depressing” and that pay flexibility encourages schools to poach staff.

Fewer than 50 per cent of those who begin teacher training are teaching after five years, the report notes. As retention rates tend to be better for those who have trained through employment routes rather than university or postgraduate courses, the expansion of employment-based routes is recommended.

According to the report, teaching is no longer seen as a job for life, and so the MPs call for “a good balance” within the profession between those who are long-term teachers, those who stay in the profession for just a few years and those coming to teaching as a second or third career.

They also emphasise the need for a “managed approach” to retirement to ensure that there is no sudden exodus of half of the workforce.

While there is praise for elements of the Government’s five-year plan for education, the report concludes that “without sufficient appropriately qualified and experienced teachers, all plans for improvements in school provision will come to nothing”.

www.publications.parliament.uk/pa
/cm/cmeduski.htm

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