An estimated 88.7 percent of teachers in England who qualified in 2022 were still teaching at schools one year after receiving their teaching qualification. By comparison, 86.4 percent of teachers who qualified in 2010 were still teaching a year after qualifying, with 70.8 percent of 2010 qualifiers still teaching five years later. Teacher supply Teacher retention has been an ongoing issue for schools in England due to various factors. While then number of qualified teachers has remained relatively steady between 2015 and 2023, it has not been enough to keep pace with the rising number of pupils in state schools. Additionally, teachers are working more hours on average to cope with a rising workload. Stagnant pay may also be a contributing factor to declining teacher retention, with average primary teacher starting salaries in England falling well behind many of its European neighbors. Teacher strikes National strikes took place in the UK on throughout 2022 and 2023, with members of four teachers unions taking industrial action. This strike action was related to teacher pay amid an ongoing cost of living crisis. Most state-school teachers in England and Wales had a five percent pay rise in 2022, but unions argue that with inflation exceeding ten percent that year, teachers were having to take real-terms pay cuts. The government was initially reluctant to negotiate with unions due to a squeeze on government finances and strike action across many sectors in the UK. By July 2023, however, a deal with the government was reached for the 2023/24 academic, whereby teachers would receive a 6.5 percent pay rise.

Percentage of teachers remaining in state-funded schools in England in the years following obtaining their Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), by year of gaining QTS

Full and part-time teachers by year of gaining qualified teacher status, who were in service the following year and the percentage recorded in service in state funded schools in England in each year after.

Retention rates and headcounts of senior leaders in state funded primary or secondary schools at any teaching post within the same school phase.

Percentage of teachers remaining in state-funded schools in England in the years following obtaining their Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), by year of gaining QTS.

ECTs participating in ECF-based induction who were retained in the SWC after one year, two years and three years, broken down by program type, region, school phase, school type, age group, sex, ethnicity, grade and working pattern.

The Multilingualism and Multiliteracy (MultiLila) project was a four-year research study (2016 –2020).It aimed to examine whether a match or mismatch between the child’s home language(s) and the school language affect learning outcomes while at the same time taking into other factors that can affect a child’s performance on basic school skills and more advanced, problem-solving and reasoning skills. Specifically, socioeconomic status, school site, urban vs. rural location and differences between two urban sites (Delhi and Hyderabad) were considered when evaluating learning outcomes in the project’s tasks. The project also sought to understand whether children who use more than one language in the home or children who live in linguistically highly diverse environments have better cognitive skills than children in monolingual or less diverse contexts. A variety of quantitative and qualitative data were collected over a period of four years. The data include children’s performance on the fourteen different tasks of literacy, numeracy, oral language, verbal reasoning, and cognitive tasks mentioned above. In addition, we collected data from the surveys and questionnaires used for teacher and head-teacher interviews.

This innovative project examines the causes of low educational outcomes in schools in India where many children fail to achieve basic literacy and numeracy levels, while dropout rates, affecting girls more than boys, are very high. A starting point of this research is that bilingualism and multilingualism have revealed cognitive advantages and good learning skills in children raised in western societies. Multilingualism is the norm in India. However, rather than enjoying cognitive and learning advantages, multilingual Indian children show low levels of basic learning skills including critical thinking and problem-solving. This project is innovative in seeking to disentangle the causes of this paradox. The project builds on Tsimpli's large scale (600K) EU-funded THALES bilingualism project which assessed cognitive and language abilities of 700+ children in five different countries, expanding this project into numeracy, critical thinking and problem solving in multilingual children which are key elements in the Indian context. The PI and co-Is have been preparing this application for the last two years in conjunction with the current project partners and consultants in India with 20k. funding from the British Council and 3k funding from the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism at the University of Reading. The PI was invited to take part in a Roundtable discussion on Multilingual Education at the British Council in September 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXMhAzgcdzM).The applicants discussed key questions from charities and schools and obtained advice from a range of educational and linguistics experts in Delhi and Hyderabad and visited different schools in both cities in 2014-15. The key question this project seeks to address is to explore how the complex dynamics of social, economic and geographical contexts affect the delivery of quality multilingual education in India. The growth of literacy and numeracy in children is constrained by complex interactions between elements of the education system, the context in which they are embedded, and the dynamics operating within that system. By conducting research among children living in urban slums in Delhi and Hyderabad as well as in remote rural areas of Bihar where food deprivation, low sanitation, poverty and migration make school attendance and education hard to maintain, the project focuses on structural and language inequalities affecting educational quality in India. Language inequalities arise because a large number of children in India are deprived of receiving mother-tongue support, being instructed only in the regional language and English, often from teachers with poor teaching qualifications and practices or limited knowledge of the language of instruction too. Teaching practices in India are teacher- and textbook-centred with detrimental effects on the development of critical thinking and problem solving abilities. These skills are fundamental in every learning process including numeracy and the understanding of mathematics. The method of this study is highly innovative in a number of ways. A combination of several tasks and questionnaires will address the role of several factors on learning outcomes. Each child's language, literacy and numeracy skills will be evaluated at two time points with a one year interval between them. This design is known to provide reliable findings on the development of learning rather than only on knowledge itself allowing future interventions to build on these findings to ensure improved outcomes. This study will provide policymakers and practitioners with concrete ideas on how to improve learning outcomes in the multilingual education context of India. It will offer a crucial understanding of how these ideas will translate to their specific contexts and institutions in India across regions and states. At the same time, the project will also inform UK stakeholders about educating bilingual children in the UK.