Teaching crisis as vacancies double in past year

Teachers vacancies have almost doubled in the last year, leaving state schools short of more than 5,000 teachers, official statistics revealed yesterday.

Hundreds more positions in the profession have been left empty than the Government had been expecting.

However, headteachers said that the figures only told "half the story" and warned that the teacher shortage was far worse than even the latest statistics suggested.

According to teachers' leader, schools have reached "crisis point". David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said an excessive workload was causing the "dangerous haemorrhage" of staff.

John Dunford, of the Secondary Heads Association, warned that many children were having their education disrupted by a succession of supply teachers.

One former science teacher, Ged Finnegan, blamed workload, bureaucracy and a lack of room for creativity for driving teachers from the profession.

Mr Finnegan, who now runs an education website, said: "My view is that kids are now being trained to pass tests rather than being educated. That wasn't the job I had wanted to go into.

The new statistics were published by the Department for Education and Skills on its website yesterday, without press notices being circulated. They showed that England and Wales were short of 5,076 teachers last year, up from 2,977 in 2000.

They also showed that during 1999/200 some 19,000 teachers – 2,000 more than the previous year – quit state schools in England, either leaving the profession or moving to independent schools.

State schools in London and the South-east were the worst hit, with nearly one in five teachers leaving their jobs and more than half of them quitting teaching altogether.

There was also a 20 per cent increase in the number of teachers taking early retirement to 3,200. And 2,610 teachers left the profession because of severe ill-health, more than the previous year.

Inspectors from Ofsted, the education standards watchdog, have concluded that efforts to raise standards were hampered by staff shortages last year.

In his annual report this month, Mike Tomlinson, the chief inspector, warned that schools were increasingly having to rely on staff who were not adequately qualified or supply teachers who could not control classes.

The statistics did contain some good news for ministers – an increase in the number of teachers employed in schools, as well as a rise in the numbers of students beginning to train as teachers.

But teachers' leaders issued a grave warning about the state of the profession.

Mr Dunford, who is general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said: "This confirms the evidence from schools that teacher recruitment is at crisis point and that the Government's measure have so far failed to solve the problem.

"The situation has certainly not improved since last year. We are seeing a lot of over-reliance on supply teachers and hence greater instability in the education of many children."

Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said the situation was "desperately unsatisfactory".

"These are the huge problems facing teachers every day which the Government needs to tackle immediately."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills said ministers were pleased to see a rise in the numbers of people coming into teaching. "But we are not complacent and we are now turning our attention to better addressing retention issues. We remain committed, for example, to finding a new way of working to tackle excessive workload and are working closely with employers and unions to achieve this.