On paper, this is the best year for teacher supply in a decade. Fewer teachers are leaving, schools are finding it easier to recruit, and ministers have just accepted a 3.5 per cent pay rise recommendation from the pay review body. It seems the worst of the shortages is behind us, but little of it is the Department for Education’s doing, and that means it may be short-lived. The recovery in teacher supply has been driven largely by the broader labour market’s decline, not by any particular policy change. When graduate jobs are scarce, teaching looks safer by comparison, so more people train to teach and fewer teachers leave. Graduate hiring fell by nearly 15 per cent last year, its steepest fall since the financial crisis, and teaching has benefited. The pay review body itself expects that squeeze to keep teaching relatively attractive But that squeeze cannot be relied upon to last. A thin graduate market is bad for the young people living through it, and the wider government will rightly work to turn it around. If it succeeds, teaching’s advantage fades with it. Pay is the most effective lever Falling pupil numbers are easing the pressure from the demand side too, but far more slowly. Neither force is the department’s to control, which is exactly why it should use the time it has been given to fix what it can. Pay is the most effective lever the department holds to prepare for that day. It may not be the most important thing to teachers. What they do and who they do it with matters more. But it still matters, and it has been slipping. Teachers’ pay buys around 14 per cent less than it did in 2010, and that has fallen furthest for the most experienced staff. The consequences are already visible in the department’s own data. A headship was once the most stable job in the profession. In 2010, just one head in fifty left the state sector each year. Today it is about one in thirteen, which is almost four times that rate and nearly the same rate at which classroom teachers leave. Pay is not the only reason a head leaves. Accountability and workload have worsened over that period and made it a far harder job. But if you let the pay of your most experienced people erode, you should not be surprised when they begin to leave. The schools most likely to lose them are also the most challenging to lead, and those most in need of experienced leaders. Flat rise isn’t best use of budgets That is why the shape of this pay award matters as much as its size. Departmental budgets are finite, and this flat rise, spread evenly across every teacher in the country, is not the best use of it. It does little for schools, subjects and posts where staffing is hardest, while handing a welcome but unneeded bonus where recruitment is easy. When every school recruits from the same pool, the more comfortable ones win while the schools that struggled before – overwhelmingly the most challenging – struggle on. A uniform pay rise entrenches the very gaps we should be closing. The department knows this, because it already has schemes that pay more where need is greatest. It pays shortage-subject teachers extra to stay in disadvantaged schools, and this award also lets maintained schools pay bonuses. The review body was not persuaded that pay should be differentiated, but the department’s practice is already running ahead of the principle. What remains is to make the exception the rule and let pay follow the shortages: give the hardest-to-staff schools the freedom and the funding to pay what it takes to keep the people they cannot afford to lose. While the state of the graduate labour market is concerning, it has handed the department the time and space to fix problems before the market turns. The temptation is always to trumpet the gains and move on, but this is a recovery the department can neither control nor predict. The question is whether it will be brave enough to direct pay where it is needed, or gamble that its luck holds, and leave the same schools short, and the same headships empty when the market turns.