Trainee teacher drop-out rate doubles in four years

The proportion of trainee teachers who don’t go on to achieve qualified teacher status has doubled since 2019, new data shows.

But of those who do qualify, a higher proportion end up teaching.

The statistics further demonstrate the huge challenge faced by the new Labour government in meeting its target of recruiting 6,500 extra teachers in England’s state schools.

The Department for Education has published data on teachers who took postgraduate training courses in the academic year 2022-23.

The statistics show 8 per cent of those who trained that year did not go on to gain qualified teacher status, up from 7 per cent the year before and 4 per cent in 2019-20.

However, of those who did obtain QTS, the proportion who were teaching in a state school 16 months after the end of the academic year actually rose from a low of 73 per cent of those who trained in 2020-21 to 76 per cent in 2022-23.

Major problem for new government

It comes amid a worsening teacher recruitment and retention crisis. The government recruited almost 14,000 fewer postgraduate trainees this year than it needed, missing its secondary target by 50 per cent.

Today’s data shows that even when the government is successful in recruiting trainees, a larger proportion each year do not go on to achieve QTS. The data does not differentiate between those who dropped out and those who failed to achieve the status.

Overall, there were 8,362 fewer postgraduate teacher trainees in 2022-23 than the year before. Numbers had increased in 2020-21 and 2021-22 due to economic uncertainty caused by the Covid pandemic.

This correlates with ITT census numbers published in December 2022, which showed that the number of postgraduate trainees recruited that September fell 23 per cent from 30,093 to 23,244.

The latest census data, for the academic year that just ended, showed 21,946 postgraduate trainees were recruited, against a target of 35,540.