Dr Vikki Smith, the Education and Training Foundation’s (ETF) Executive Director, Education and Standards, has lent her expertise to a special issue of Education + Training (ET) focused on vocational education and training (VET) recruitment and retention challenges. Published in August this year, the ET special issue brings together international studies – including from Australia, Chile, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria – to explore the significant challenges involved in recruiting and retaining teachers.
The ET special issue includes a guest editorial produced by Dr Vikki Smith, in collaboration with Professor Gary Husband, Associate Professor of Further, Adult and Vocational Education at the University of Sunderland.
In their guest editorial, Vikki and Gary draw on international case studies to shed light on the UK’s teacher recruitment and retention challenges and propose potential remedies to address this issue. They identify three key challenges for educators repeated across the special issue’s papers: workload pressures; limited professional development opportunities; and unclear career progression pathways. Having cross-examined the international case studies covered in the special issue, Vikki and Garry propose possible solutions and areas for development in UK sectoral practices. Among their recommendations are the need for investment in teacher training and development, promotion of career progression pathways, and enhanced work-life balance and well-being support.
Further ETF expertise was featured in the ET special issue in a paper by ETF’s Associate Director for Policy and Research, Dr Paul Tully. Paul’s paper – ‘Mission impossible? A strategic approach to improving the recruitment and retention of further education and training teachers in England’ – pulls together research on teacher recruitment and retention in England and frames these against DfE’s Skills for Jobs policy commitments. Paul analyses a number of proposed solutions to retention and recruitment challenges, reflecting on their implications.
You can access the Education + Training special issue (Volume 66, Issue 5) on the emerald insight website.