Teacher retention is the number, not vacancies

If you sell into schools as a recruiter, there are two numbers in the workforce census and only one of them is worth building a pipeline on.

The vacancy rate is the one everybody reaches for, and it averages 0.36 per cent across 21,965 schools. That looks absurd next to any staffroom conversation, and the reason is definitional: it counts posts formally advertised and unfilled on census day in November. A post covered by an agency, a post being carried by the existing team, a post the head hasn't advertised because there's no budget yet, none of those appear. It's a snapshot of paperwork, not of need.

Retention is the honest one. It averaged 83.7 per cent, meaning roughly one teacher in six was not in the same school a year later. That's the churn that generates actual vacancies, and it happens all year rather than on census day.

The supporting numbers fill in the picture: an average pupil-teacher ratio of 19.1, an average teacher salary of £48,129, and 8.3 sickness days per teacher.

Put those together and the sales logic changes. A school with retention well below 83.7 per cent has a recurring problem and a recurring budget line, and it will still have one next year. A school with a single advertised vacancy has a task, which somebody will close in six weeks whether you call or not.

We'd build the target list on retention and sickness, not vacancies, and we'd revisit it annually rather than monthly, because that's the frequency at which the underlying data actually moves.

The caveat we can't get past: this is the 2024-25 return, published in arrears, so it describes last academic year. Nobody publishes a live view of school staffing and anyone claiming to have one is modelling, not measuring.

Method. Counted from the DfE school workforce census for 2024-25 as we import it, averaged across the 21,965 schools with a return. Retention is the DfE's own measure of teachers remaining in the same school year on year.