Scouts wins £129,000 DfE contract to boost teacher recruitment
Amrit Virdi
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Scouts has been handed a £129,000 government contract to promote teaching as a career pathway to its young members.
The Get into Teaching Candidate Pipeline Strategy aims to tackle teacher sufficiency by increasing the recruitment of young people who may not have considered it as a career.
The strategy focuses on promoting teaching through partnerships to a younger audience, with a focus on areas where recruitment is most challenging, including: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and modern foreign languages.
Through the three-year partnership, the Department for Education will work with the Scouts’ Explorers groups to provide 44,000 14-to 18-year-olds with knowledge on how to pursue a teaching career.
Activities will contribute to the existing Scouts programme, and adult Scouts volunteers will be encouraged to raise awareness of teaching as a career choice.
Weekly face-to-face activities focusing on “citizenship and employability and have a positive outcome on community and future generations” will be implemented with the aim to “create bespoke accessible and inclusive activities for young people by linking badges and higher awards to the ambitions of the Get into Teaching service”.
According to the contract for the project, posted on the DfE website, “research shows that career inspiration for young people would strongly benefit from starting earlier in the school journey”.
A DfE spokesperson said: “Values such as leadership, teamwork and citizenship, which are key to nurturing high-quality teachers, directly tie into the Scout’s mission to support young people in their personal development and help them make a positive contribution to society.
“This will raise awareness of teaching as a potential career choice for young people, helping to build a pipeline of future candidates for Initial Teacher Training.”
A Scouts spokesperson said: “We're thrilled to be collaborating with the Department of Education as part of their wider Get Into Teaching programme of activities, showcasing to our young people their potential in leadership, confidence, teamwork, and resilience, all of which are vital qualities for a fulfilling teaching career.
"We will help Scouts recognise how the skills acquired in Scouts can serve as pathways to train for a future teaching career.”
Postgraduate teacher recruitment was 38% below target in the 2023/24 academic year, according to the Initial Teacher Training census.
The announcement has been met with a mixed response across the education sector.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “Teaching has the potential to be a rewarding and life-long graduate career.
“However, the government has comprehensively failed to hit its recruitment targets. People are put off from joining the profession because of the unsustainable workload, poor pay, and the broken Ofsted inspection regime - which damages the well-being of teachers and leaders.
“Ministers cannot gloss over these problems with pricey advertising campaigns and paid partnerships. Instead, government should invest to make teaching a sustainable and rewarding graduate career. If the government is serious about solving the growing crisis in recruitment and retention, it must make teaching a competitive career in the graduate marketplace by improving pay, terms, and conditions.”
Mary Bousted, former joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), branded the decision “bizarre” on X. She said: “The causes of the teacher supply crisis are well known. They must be addressed if teaching is going to recover its status as a desirable profession”.
Education author Daren White added: “Try to convince me you're doing something about the R&R (recruitment and retention) crisis in education, without actually doing anything. Newsflash! Scouts already develop 'teaching skills' and have done for decades.”
Also, love that the Government are going to get the scouts to encourage suitable candidates into teaching.
— Blackear (@Blackear77) April 10, 2024
That'll be the best idea they've had after missing recruitment targets for the past decade.🙄
The government invested £1.5 million to boost teacher recruitment and retention in January.
