Today the Department for Education (DfE) published the latest statistics (November 2010) on the school workforce in England, giving a clear picture of who the teachers are in the country.
Here are some interesting facts I noticed:
* There are just over 200 thousand teachers employed in nurseries and primary schools.
* The number of unqualified teachers dropped from 6.4 thousand in Nov. 2005 to 4.1 thousand in Nov. 2010. Considering that most of these unqualified teachers are overseas trained teachers (like me in 2005), it shows the effects of the government’s decision to take primary school teachers off the list of shortage occupations and to tighten the work permit visas.
* Men are still a minority in primary school classrooms: 11% of the classroom teachers in primary school are men and 64% of them are under 40 years old. Overall, 60% of the classroom teachers (both men and women) are under 40 years old.
* Teachers from ethnic minorities tend to have lower level qualification and many are employed as unqualified teachers. 92% of the classroom teachers in publicly funded primary schools are white British/Irish. The remaining 8% consists of mixed background, black, Asian and other ethnic minority groups. It would be interesting to find out the number of ethnic minority teachers in multicultural and multilingual cities, e.g. London and Manchester. Would the teachers’ background in these areas reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of the students?
* Primary school teachers tend to be highly educated: 67% of those who provided their level of education had one of these qualifications – Doctorates and other Level 8 qualifications, Masters and other Level 7 qualifications (e.g. Post Graduate certificates and diplomas), and first degrees (excluding BEds) and other level 6 qualifications (e.g. graduate certificates and diplomas). Again, considering that the vast majority of the teachers are white British/Irish, I wonder what qualifications the ethnic minority teachers hold or what percentage of them have a qualified teacher status.
category: Classroom