Nursery World - School of thought

The Government’s well-received strategy on school teacher recruitment shows what could be achieved if it made the same effort with early years

Last month I wrote about the need to raise the pay, parity and esteem of the early years workforce. Fast-forward a couple of weeks and the Government launched its long-awaited strategy on teacher recruitment and retention.

It was met with almost unanimous support from the teaching profession (including some of the unions) and the wider education sector – a response which is rare for any government.

The key to this success lies, undoubtedly, in the involvement of the teaching profession from the outset. Unlike many other exercises in consultation, this involvement seemed genuinely collaborative. Not only did the Government work closely with experts, but the strategy also considers recent evidence about the scale of the challenge and the effectiveness of different interventions. Rather than try to implement quick fixes, the Government has sought to identify some of the root causes of recruitment and retention problems and to tackle them through evidence-based (and, importantly, funded) interventions.

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