Featured in this report: Education
Focus of our report
The Department considers that the quality of teaching is more important to pupil outcomes than anything else a school can control. Having enough high-quality teachers is essential to the effective operation of the school system.
It was reported in 2016 on whether the Department was achieving value for money through its arrangements to train new teachers. It was concluded that the Department had missed its recruitment targets for new trainee teachers for the past four years and that there were signs that teacher shortages were growing.
This report focuses on the Department’s arrangements to develop and retain the existing teaching workforce. These arrangements would be working optimally if there were enough teachers of the right quality in the right places, and if this was being achieved in a cost-effective way. For example, it is likely to be more effective and cheaper for the taxpayer to encourage existing teachers to stay in the profession, provided they are performing well, than it would be to train new teachers.
This report examines whether the Department is effectively supporting the schools sector to retain and develop the teaching workforce, it assesses:
We set out our audit approach and our evidence base in the appendix.
