As Labour’s Bridget Phillipson pledges to boost teacher recruitment, the real challenge lies in keeping them. Cuts to arts bursaries and the undervaluing of English risk draining schools of experience, diversity and the very skills — empathy, critical thinking and creativity — that education most needs in an age of AI and misinformation, argues Peter Thomas

Briget Phillipson, Secretary of State for Education in the Labour Government, has been careful to avoid the tedious Tory rhetoric of ‘ratcheting up standards’, the mantra of those who confuse education with SATs and GCSE grade outcomes. Several of her announcements have been refreshingly about teachers, students, and schools where people enjoy spending time. She said she is ‘determined that we have more brilliant teachers… improving the lives of more children and young people’. Those teachers, she said, need to be ‘talented people with the passion and drive to inspire the next generation, working their magic, making school a place pupils want to be.’

So far, so good. Boosting recruitment has to be a good thing, especially if it reduces a major cause of workload stress in state schools — class size. But recruitment is only one part of the situation. A greater problem is that of retention across all subjects. The full-time equivalent (FTE) teaching force today stands at 468,300. The latest figures show that 41,700 new teachers were recruited and 41,200 teachers chose to leave the profession. This means the loss of experienced teachers and their replacement by novices, albeit, one hopes, willing and keen ones. One of the main strengths of a school is the stability provided by experienced staff who youngsters see as competent, purposeful and worthy of respect — attributes it takes time to develop. Skewing the age profile towards younger, inexperienced teachers removes a precious school asset, not only to students but to the young teachers needing role models and mentors. So a drop-out rate of nearly 40% of new recruits after four years is an alarm signal needing action.

Given the 28% shortfall in recruitment of English teachers in 2023-24, Ms Phillipson will be pleased to see that there was a 1% over-recruitment of English teachers in 2024-25, though that improvement precedes her tenure of office. Let’s hope she continues the improved rate of recruitment rather than think it’s ‘job done’ if recruitment meets the target for the status quo, meaning class sizes of 30 or more. It’s worth thinking briefly about the young English entrants joining the profession. If they are straight out of university, they are the students whose primary experience of English was dominated by phonic decoding and SATs, whose early secondary experience was very likely dominated by PEE and Daforest and whose runup to GCSE in 2020 was in the Covid mix of home-based work and Oak slideshows. They may have broadened their curricular vision at university, but teacher trainers know that trainees’ own school experience has a strong influence on their understanding and practice. This is especially true if their initial training is not through a university/schools partnership that highlights the variety of theory, ideology and practice in education, nationally and internationally. Newer, more DfE-favoured non-university routes have increased their share of recruitment, cutting out wider and longer perspectives in favour of speedy immersion in the academy chain culture accepting them. It is particularly unhelpful that one of these routes shamelessly promotes the temporary nature of professional commitment in the name Teach First. Schools need to draw in recruits who have age and out-of-school experience. Perhaps there could be a scheme promoted as ‘having a go at a job or two before finding something else’. It would need some shrewd marketing, of course. Perhaps it could be called Work First… 

All this means that Bridget Phillipson needs to be ambitious beyond merely hitting the annual recruitment target, especially in English. Shortages in other subjects have resulted in hefty bursaries as an incentive to train. In the case of chemistry, computing, maths and physics, the bursary for 2025-26 was £29000, and will stay at that for 2026-27. For modern foreign languages, biology, DT and geography, it was £26000 in 2025-26, reducing in 2026-27 to £5000 except for DT at £20000. This clearly represents an enduring national emphasis on STEM subjects as a high priority. And where there are high priorities, there are, inevitably, low priorities. In the bursary stakes, the low priorities are art and design, music and RE, which in 2025-26 were allocated £10,000. And even lower than those low priorities came English, with £5000. If these differentials feature in recruitment, they certainly feature in the way professional equals look at some staffroom colleagues as more equal than others, especially when class size and mark-load differences between subjects affect teacher morale and well-being.

But it gets worse. For 202627, art and design, music, RE and English will have no bursaries. They are being cut. Completely. STEM subjects just shy of £30k. Arts subjects zilch. That kind of value differential is particularly disappointing from a Labour Government aware of the errors of its predecessor.

I am not complaining about education needing to firm up its STEM expertise to meet the technological demands of the 21st century. I want to see an equal firming up of education’s expertise in meeting demands other than those of commerce and industry. Those demands come from a future that is already as close as the phone in your hand. They come from the revolution of AI, where illusions of reality are quickly and persuasively conjured; where instant info access makes reading and research slow, and originality laborious. Youngsters still in primary school may be amused by digitally plausible YouTube clips of cats in orchestras but they are potential prey to malicious synthetic media ‘deepfakery’. Unregulated social media rants masquerade conspiracy theories as Truth and, in the street, manipulated populism has licensed anger, hatred and ignorance with a flag, re-badging racism and bigotry as ‘patriotism’. That’s the future already here: on its way, welcomed by some, Trumpism asserts its agenda of making education the engine of nationalism, religiosity and compliance with Authority.

These are social demands of the century we’re in: they call for critical thinking, media literacy and civic literacy — a synthesis of analysis, evaluation, intelligence and ethics that come from the arts in general and from English in particular. Other subjects do not have the same ability to develop understanding of how and why fictions work in life, let alone on the page, and the human cost of mendacity, intolerance and unrestrained ego. These are current menaces reprising ancient vices and they are well explored in literature. Never was there a time when new citizens needed more to be sustained by the humane disciplines of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a last chance for new citizens to face this evolving century with scepticism, creativity and empathy. And with a grasp of the ways in which modern technology purveys some ancient evils.

This is not a time to de-incentivise the arts, and certainly not English, or to make recruitment of older entrants with families impossible without funding their own retraining. Nor is it a time to allow a further drain of experienced staff. So, what Bridget Phillipson could do to recruit and reward ‘talented people with the passion and drive to inspire the next generation’ and make ‘school a place pupils want to be’ is restore the arts training bursaries and introduce a cancellation of all student debt when teachers reach their tenth year of employment. Children, parents, culture and society at large will gain from such decisive government action.