Around three-quarters of colleges in England are unable to recruit the staff needed to teach technical and digital subjects, new research has found, threatening Government efforts to close the national skills gap.
Around 85% of institutions surveyed by the Association of Colleges (AOC), the higher education sector body, reported shortages in construction courses, 78% in engineering and 62 % in IT and IT.
The data points to growing recruitment problems affecting colleges as teachers leave the profession for higher wages in the private sector, where companies are handing out bigger pay packets to try to plug gaps in their workforce of work
The survey, commissioned by the Financial Times, assessed 87 colleges in England, representing around 37 per cent of the sector. Three-quarters of colleges said the main reason they were struggling to fill places was because qualified candidates had been offered better pay elsewhere.
Many principals said they were looking to fill dozens of vacancies, while 40 percent said they were forced to cancel courses due to staff shortages.
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Karen Spencer, principal of Harlow College in Essex, has experienced the problem first-hand. She knows there is high demand for electrical engineering courses this year, but has had to cancel the engineering apprenticeship program due to staffing issues.
Electrical engineers in the UK can earn more than £70,000 a year, with apprentices starting at £40,000, Spencer said, while engineering lecturers rarely earn more than £39,000. The university cannot compete with corporate salaries, he added.
“You end up in this vicious cycle of competing for people and you never get that flow of workers,” Spencer said. “When you know there’s a demand for jobs and good-paying jobs, you feel like something’s wrong when you can’t hire. You can’t meet that need.”
A training provider in the North West told the AOC: “Professionals and trades can earn a lot more money in their own specialist industry than they can on a FE teacher’s salary.” The offer of better holidays and a good pension is not enough to sway people, they added.
Unlike pay scales for school teachers, which are set by the government, universities decide their own staff salaries. The AOC recommends paying qualified teachers between £25,000 and £39,000, falling to £21,000 for unqualified teachers.
This month, 39 colleges voted for industrial action next term over complaints about pay and conditions.
Professor Winston Thomas teaches students about electrical circuits at Harlow College © Charlie Bibby/FT
According to the AOC, university teachers are paid an average of £9,000 less than school teachers. It said wages in the education sector rose by just 0.3 per cent in the year to February, compared with 2.5 per cent in the public sector and 5.4 per cent in the private sector.
Educators said long-term funding cuts to continuing education had left them unable to offer competitive salaries. Government funding for 16- to 18-year-olds at universities in England fell by 14% in the decade from 2010, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank, while overall spending in adult education fell by more than a third in the same period.
“Colleges want to pay their staff more, and they absolutely would if they could,” said AOC chief executive David Hughes. “It’s an outrage and part of the problem with recruitment and retention issues.”
As a result, the number of teaching vacancies has risen sharply, recruiters said. Gavin Beart, chief executive of employment agency Reed, said the past 12 months had been the “toughest” yet for teacher recruitment, with education vacancies at 50 per cent.
“Colleges have had a very difficult time [and] they are meant to be the answer to our skills problem,” he added.
Educators believe the problem needs a national approach, with more government support. “Our job is to train enough people so that we don’t have a shortage of national qualifications,” said Jo Maher, principal of Loughborough College in Leicestershire. “We need help – if it’s a national skills gap, it should be seen as a national challenge.”
To solve the problem, the Department of Education launched an awareness campaign to encourage the most qualified professionals to move from industry to teaching.
It said it had “supported more than 700 industry professionals to train as higher education teachers and plans to double this”.
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Meanwhile, some colleges are taking larger classes and training teachers on the job to solve the problem. John Cartwright, head of construction and built environment at Hartlepool University in north-east England, said: “It’s more responsibility for managers . . . there’s a lot more hand-holding. Everyone is involved and everyone is covering the classes “.
He noted that local bricklayers were commanding around £1,400 for four-and-a-half-day weeks, the equivalent of a salary of £60,000 a year, almost double the salary of an average university professor.
“Competing against the industry is really hard right now,” he said. “We want someone with experience, qualified to give our students the best possible experience [but] we can’t find anyone.”