As reported by CYP Now, the Scouts team up with the government to encourage young members to consider teaching as a career option, aiming to address teacher shortages in critical subject areas
The Get into Teaching Candidate Pipeline Strategy aims to tackle teacher sufficiency by increasing the recruitment of young people who may not have considered it as a career.
The strategy focuses on promoting teaching through partnerships to a younger audience, with a focus on areas where recruitment is most challenging, including: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and modern foreign languages.
Through the three-year partnership, the Department for Education will work with the Scouts’ Explorers groups to provide 44,000 14-to 18-year-olds with knowledge on how to pursue a teaching career.
Activities will contribute to the existing Scouts programme, and adult Scouts volunteers will be encouraged to raise awareness of teaching as a career choice.
Weekly face-to-face activities focusing on “citizenship and employability and have a positive outcome on community and future generations” will be implemented with the aim to “create bespoke accessible and inclusive activities for young people by linking badges and higher awards to the ambitions of the Get into Teaching service”.
According to the contract for the project, posted on the DfE website, “research shows that career inspiration for young people would strongly benefit from starting earlier in the school journey”.
A DfE spokesperson said: “Values such as leadership, teamwork and citizenship, which are key to nurturing high-quality teachers, directly tie into the Scout’s mission to support young people in their personal development and help them make a positive contribution to society.
“This will raise awareness of teaching as a potential career choice for young people, helping to build a pipeline of future candidates for Initial Teacher Training.”
Postgraduate teacher recruitment was 38% below target in the 2023/24 academic year, according to the Initial Teacher Training census.
The announcement has been met with a mixed response across the education sector.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “Teaching has the potential to be a rewarding and life-long graduate career.
“However, the government has comprehensively failed to hit its recruitment targets. People are put off from joining the profession because of the unsustainable workload, poor pay, and the broken Ofsted inspection regime – which damages the well-being of teachers and leaders.
“Ministers cannot gloss over these problems with pricey advertising campaigns and paid partnerships. Instead, government should invest to make teaching a sustainable and rewarding graduate career. If the government is serious about solving the growing crisis in recruitment and retention, it must make teaching a competitive career in the graduate marketplace by improving pay, terms, and conditions.”
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