Tim Clark spoke about SEND education at the Guildhall at the launch of his third educational report which was attended by former schools minister Damian Hinds MP, Sir Bernard Jenkin and former chair of the Education Select Committee Neil Carmichael

My third educational report is on special needs (SEND). There is nothing in my report that is radical or revolutionary. Instead it’s an attempt to try and help policy-makers who understand what the issues are around delivery of special needs policy.

I was the head of two state schools. This is written from the point of view of people who have to deliver SEND education. There are issues around funding, delivery, working with external agencies and issues around the identification of special needs.

Tim Clark’s bi-annual Better Schools Report Event at Guildhall, London. 10.10.2024 Photographer Sam Pearce/www.square-image.co.uk

In my view the single best thing we can do to support children with SEND – and it happens to be the same thing which we can do to support children without special needs – is to provide every child with enough well-qualified, motivated, experienced teachers. The recruitment and contention crisis with teachers at the moment is the single biggest issue facing schools: not money, not curriculum, it is the difficulty of finding enough well-qualified, well-trained teachers.

I’ll use two statistics to prove this point. Last academic year 40,000 teachers – more than nine per cent of the workforce – quit for reasons other than retirement. Now this is made worse, because about 20 per cent of the workforce are over 50 and so are nearing retirement soon. But over nine per cent of the workforce walked out last year.

In the same timeframe, one half of all teacher training places were left vacant. If you put those two statistics together then that is a crisis. The current government and the previous government did not seize this issue with the urgency which it needs to be seized with.

The 2024 Conservative manifesto talked about offering bursaries, which may well attract new people into the profession. But we have a shortage of teachers – and in any case, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that money doesn’t retain teachers. If you look at the strikes last year, which were predominantly about money, one half of teachers didn’t even bother to vote in the ballot.

I’m not saying that teachers shouldn’t be paid more money – they absolutely should. But it’s not the key issue.

Tim Clark’s bi-annual Better Schools Report Event at Guildhall, London. 10.10.2024 Photographer Sam Pearce/www.square-image.co.uk

Meanwhile, what have the Labour Party promised? They repeatedly state that they will create 6,500 new teachers but they don’t say where they’re going to come from and they also don’t say how they’re going to be retained. That’s important because the other alarming statistic is that one third of teachers quit within five years.

We also need to look at the maths here. How far would 6,500 new teachers really get you? There are more than 20,000 schools in England. If you get 6,500 teachers that equates to one new teacher for every three schools. But then think of the 40,000 who have just left – that equates to almost two for every school.

In one sense, the number of teachers we have is not necessarily a crisis – the latest workforce report by the Department for Education says we have 300 more teachers this year than last year. The only problem is there are 74,000 more kids than the previous year.

That number also includes more overseas-trained teachers – that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What really concerns me is that that number also includes a huge explosion in unqualified teachers. When I was qualifying, I went the traditional route. In my day, they were talking about making the PGCE two years and nowadays there are many allowed to teach with very few qualifications at all.

We have got to resolve for the benefit of all children the recruitment and retention crisis. In our last two reports, we looked at how this can be resolved. The really good news is that this can be resolved at very little cost to the Treasury and the taxpayer.

To read Tim Clark’s report go to the following link: