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Home / Publications & Research / Benchmarking English Education / Education: the fundamentals – Eleven facts about the education system in England

Education: the fundamentals – Eleven facts about the education system in England

A major new report on education in England is published today by UK 2040 Options, led by Nesta, and The Education Policy Institute.

The report combines data, analysis and insights from over 75 education experts on the education challenges facing the next government and possible solutions to improve outcomes.

The report shows that:

• All sectors of the education system are facing a workforce crisis. In schools, only 69% of those who qualified 5 years ago are still teaching, and 15% of that cohort left in their first year. 
• The pupil population in England is set to decline significantly due to low birth rates. The state school population currently stands at 7.93 million children, and this will fall by around 800,000 by 2032. 
• The number of pupils with  an education, health and care plan for more complex  special educational needs and disabilities has increased by around 50% in just five years – but funding has not caught up with the level of need and is based (in part) on historic data.
• Only 5% of primary schools reached the Government’s target of 90% of pupils reaching the expected standard in key stage 2 reading, writing and mathematics in 2019.
• Pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds experience an attainment gap (relative to their more affluent peers) equivalent to 19 months of learning by the time they sit their GCSEs. Two fifths of this gap has appeared by the age of 5. 
• Absence from education is now one of the most pressing issues facing England’s education system – persistent absence (missing more than 10% of sessions) has increased from 13% to 24%.
• Closing the gap between skill supply and employer demand could increase national productivity by 5% – 42% of vacancies in manufacturing and 52% in construction are due to skill shortages.

The report, which follows UK 2040 Options publications on  inequality and wealth ,  economic growth ,  health  and  tax , also includes evidence of progress. England recently came fourth in the world for primary school reading proficiency and well above average in maths and science in Years 5 and 9.

But the report also reveals a system that is struggling. Thousands of children start school each year without basic skills, the disadvantage gap is growing, and education at every level is experiencing a chronic recruitment and retention challenge.

Over 75 subject experts from across a range of sectors took part in the project. There was wide agreement about the need to grapple seriously with the workforce crisis across all parts of the system, and the group put forward suggestions for how this could be achieved while continuing to improve the quality of education provision. 

More broadly the group proposed policies to:

• Support the growing number of children  with special education needs and disabilities and rebuild parents’ trust in the system;
• Address challenges inside and outside the school gates to improve educational outcomes, including lifting families out of poverty and increasing targeted funding for disadvantaged pupils;
• Make the skills system more equitable, higher quality and tailored to the needs of the economy. 

Alex Burns, Director of UK 2040 Options, said:   “Education has been less prominent than other areas in recent policy debate – we feel a long way away from “education, education, education”. But if we are to be serious about improving people’s lives and boosting the economy we will need to make sure that the education system is thriving. Whilst there are clear areas of progress, this report demonstrates the scale of the challenge for the future in areas like workforce, the disadvantage gap and support for children with special educational needs.” 

Jon Andrews, Head of Analysis at the Education Policy Institute, said:  “ Whatever the outcome of the next election, it is clear there is much to do to get education back on track following a hugely disruptive pandemic and a decade dominated by funding cuts. A focus on the early years, greater funding that is targeted at the areas in need of it the most, and a plan to ease the recruitment and retention challenges facing schools must form cornerstones of any new government’s education strategy.”

You can read the report in full here.

About UK 2040 Options

UK 2040 Options is a policy project led by Nesta that seeks to address the defining issues facing the country, from tax and economic growth to health and education. It draws on a range of experts to assess the policy landscape, explore some of the most fertile areas in more depth, test and interrogate ideas and bring fresh angles and insights to the choices that policymakers will need to confront, make and implement.

About Nesta

We are Nesta . The UK’s innovation agency for social good. We design, test and scale new solutions to society’s biggest problems, changing millions of lives for the better.  This report was produced in partnership with Nesta, as part of UK 2040 Options.

Jon Andrews

Looking to 2024: the challenges facing the education sector in the year ahead

In this article, Gavin Beart, Divisional Managing Director of Reed's education division, discusses the challenges faced by UK schools in 2024 and how the profession needs to tackle the issues head on in order to make a sharp U-turn and bring education standards in the UK to the level they should be at.

12th Jan, 2024

On this page:

At the end of 2023 a report by the House of Commons Library entitled, ‘Teacher recruitment and retention in England’, highlighted some alarming home truths for the education sector.

Overall, the number of teachers in state-funded schools has not kept in line with the number of pupils in those schools. In contrast, postgraduate teacher recruitment was 38% below target for the 2023/24 academic year. Indeed, that target has only been met once since 2015/16, when teacher recruitment was 11% above targeted levels in 2020/21.

Teaching staff recruitment and retention   

Staff recruitment and retention is one of the biggest challenges facing the education sector as we move into 2024. In summer 2023, as official statistics were released by the Department for Education (DfE), the media widely reported that in 2022, 40,000 teachers quit the profession amid a competitive wider labour market. DfE data also showed almost 13% of newly qualified teachers are leaving the profession a year after qualifying and almost 19% after their second year.

These statistics are shocking and need to be addressed before it’s too late and the education of future generations suffers.

But how do we address issues of attraction and retention when it comes to teaching?

Salary has, of course, been a major issue. Throughout the first half of last year, a long-running dispute over pay led to months of strike actions by teachers. Thankfully, this was finally resolved with teachers receiving a 6.5% pay rise from September 2023. This means teacher starting salaries outside London and on the fringe now start at £30,000.

This will clearly be welcomed, but we need to see what the DfE will do to make teaching an attractive profession for graduates to go into. The government will need to spend time, effort, and money to counter issues around teacher’s workloads, stress levels, and the pressures put upon them by Ofsted. A recent report by Education Support showed teachers feel twice as lonely at work compared to the rest of the population (14% versus 7%) and highlighted a breakdown in trust between the teaching profession and Ofsted, with questions raised about the effectiveness of inspections.

While many people outside of teaching might joke about long holidays, they probably don’t realise that teachers spend much of that time working, preparing lesson plans and analysing changes to the curriculum. The government needs to debunk and demystify these issues to present a clear PR campaign that highlights why teaching is such a worthwhile profession.

There needs to be a real push on getting people to come back into the sector after years outside of it, with a well-thought-out campaign and offer, including training, to support people back into teaching. And on top of this, the government needs to look at the mature worker and how they can encourage people to come from industry into teaching – without sacrificing having to train on no salary – people can’t justify training to be a teacher and not earning enough money to make ends meet.

Mental health and wellbeing

The House of Commons report quoted figures from a survey by TALIS, a respected EdTech business with over 30-years' experience of analysing the lives of students, into the workload of teachers. It showed full-time, lower secondary teachers in England reported working an average of 49.3 hours per week, well above the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s (OECD) stated average of 41 hours a week.

Primary school teachers were working even longer hours (51.2 per week), according to the report. These figures translated into concerns that teacher’s workloads are unmanageable, with 53% of primary and 57% of lower secondary teachers saying they had too much work.

Staff workload and wellbeing are inextricably linked. The demands put on teachers and their wellbeing need to be dealt with as a single issue.

Questions over salary are probably far from over. Although the September 2023 increase must be welcomed, many teaching leaders still have concerns. Tes magazine, previously known as the Times Educational Supplement, quoted important voices such as Lee Mason-Ellis, the CEO of The Pioneer Academy, and Chair of the headteachers’ roundtable Caroline Derbyshire as saying schools may not be able to afford to implement the 6.5% increase.

But even if we assume the salary question has been tackled, there is still plenty of work to do. The next step is to address those issues around workload – the amount of marking and preparation, the pressures around exams and the issue of SATs. There is already a campaign to say SATs are failing children and should be scrapped. Whatever the answer is, the government needs to reduce the workloads and the stress teachers have to deal with daily if there is going to be any hope of improving recruitment and retention.

The third step should centre on mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. The first part of this is acknowledging there is a problem. Once that is done, people can start to properly look for solutions, with the private sector offering many of the answers schools have been seeking. Currently, schools do not have strong benefit offerings, something which has over and again been proven within the private sector to influence the attractiveness of a workplace.

This includes addressing workload pressures in conversations, running support webinars and looking at the benefits offered in the private sector. At the moment, there is a distinct lack of flexibility in the education sector. An Education Endowment Foundation report quoted in the House of Commons report says although some schools are implementing flexible working, including personal days and part-time posts, as well as allowing teachers to complete lesson planning and marking offsite, a survey of 500 state-funded schools in England found only 3% had a flexible working policy published on their website. The DfE needs to find ways to address this and the undercurrent of problems within wellbeing. If it can, then there will be a resulting improvement in retention.

Pupils and educational attainment

Of course, we can’t talk about the challenges facing the education sector in 2024 without addressing student attainment. The coronavirus pandemic put huge pressure on schools, with teachers and pupils pressed into home learning, and the sector still hasn’t fully recovered.

Attainment levels are still below pre-pandemic levels for primary schools, particularly when it comes to core subjects such as Maths and English. Key stage 2 attainment figures for the 2022/23 academic year found that although the number of Year 6 pupils achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths is up from 2022, they remain lower than in 2019.

Then we have the worrying trend of pupil absenteeism , with an overall absence rate of 7.3% in the autumn and spring of 2022/23 and 21.2% of persistent absentees missing more than 10% of classes. Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, Amanda Speilman, when delivering her final annual report in the role, even warned that the “unwritten agreement” between parents and schools has broken since the pandemic. Essentially, it has become normal for parents to take children out of school and not to worry about doing so.

One scheme which will be vitally important for the sector in terms of countering the ongoing effect of the pandemic is the National Tutoring Programming (NTP). Introduced to provide support to those pupils who were most affected by the disruption caused to their education by Covid, the programme is in its fourth – and last – year. Due to come to an end in July, the NTP has provided vital additional money towards tuition, but there is now a worry that it will simply disappear from the schools budget.

Whether in the form of ongoing tuition or through one-to-one or small groups, there is an ongoing need to address the coronavirus induced attainment deficit. There must be a continued emphasis on improving attainment at primary level.

Part of this comes back to recruitment. There is a workforce within the tuition sector which could prove hugely valuable to schools if it can be tapped into. This, of course, brings us to the thorny issue of funding.

Funding gaps

The National Education Union (NEU) has continually criticised the government with regard to funding. School spending power has been cut since 2010 and is currently 6% below the level it was at when Davd Cameron was elected. In November 2023, the NEU’s General Secretary, Daniel Kebede, said funding levels are “inadequate on all measures” pointing to the crisis with school roofs and floors as a result of the use of reinforced autoclaved aerate concrete as one example.

That said, funding levels have improved – albeit only to the point where they are once again closing in on the levels of 14 years ago. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (TIFS) has found that school spending per pupil is likely to pass 2010 levels this year, with increases over this Parliament set to reverse the cuts which were seen up to 2019.

This comes with an important caveat though. The TIFS report concluded the impact of that additional funding has been dampened by rising levels of inflation and through cost pressures. So, while it is true to say that budgets per pupil are increasing, the costs faced by schools are rising faster resulting in a four per cent reduction in their purchasing power.

Furthermore, there are concerns even this understates the full nature of the financial challenge facing the education sector. That’s because it masks pressures in special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and support for disadvantaged children and young people. Addressing this issue requires specific investment and an increase in education, health and care plans (ECHP).

Rather than giving schools access to large amounts of funding, without any control over how it should be spent, there is a need to ring-fence it for SEND provision. That way the training and improvement in training of teaching assistants and specialist support workers can be guaranteed.

There needs to be a targeted recruitment campaign to ensure working in SEND is seen as an attractive proposition. Undoubtedly, it is demanding work, but it is also hugely rewarding, particularly for teachers working one-to-one, and getting results, with students.

The role of technology

If a lot of this makes challenging reading, there is one area which presents the education sector with a host of compelling possibilities – the increasing prevalence of technology and artificial intelligence (AI). The Oak National Academy Scheme was set up during the pandemic, with the express purpose of exploring this arena. It is now creating full lesson plans using AI.

This development has two major benefits. Firstly, such technological development will ease teacher’s workload, making the process of producing lessons plans faster and more efficient. Artificial intelligence can map out what resources they require, plan complex lessons, and even create whole curriculums.

The second benefit comes in terms of the advantages of AI for students. Not only can AI present students with a strong knowledge base, but it has uses in terms of understanding how a subject works and how it can be researched. AI can be used to make sure students are ready for exams and to do coursework. Clearly, this comes with a big caveat around the risk of cheating, but such potential negatives should not be allowed to prevent progress. The education sector needs to embrace AI, understanding its positive benefits rather than dwelling on the negatives.

In time, it will be possible for teachers to deliver lessons to 15 schools at the same time. This is something which is already happening in China. In areas where there are shortages of teachers or funding, AI can also be used through online learning. These developments should not scare people but be seen as solutions to the funding and resource issues outlined in this article.

As we have seen, the education sector faces another year of extreme challenges. There are vital decisions to be made which will have huge impacts of staff morale and ultimately on recruitment and retention levels.

There are solutions available if the government of the day can embrace them – which brings us to perhaps the most important decision of 2024, one made collectively by the people of Great Britain. We are – barring the unlikely event of a January 2025 poll – in a general election year. It will be fascinating to see the manifestos of the government and the main opposition parties as they publish them ahead of the election.

Those in the teaching profession will hope that whoever is in power by the end of 2024, they will be able to grasp the nettle of funding, resources and wellbeing to bring educational standards back to where they need to be.

If you are looking to hire teaching staff, get in touch with our specialist education recruiters today .

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The UK education system preserves inequality – new report

• Imran Tahir

Published on 13 September 2022

Our new comprehensive study, shows that education in the UK is not tackling inequality.

• Education and skills
• Poverty, inequality and social mobility
• Social mobility

Link to read article 

The Conversation

Your education has a huge effect on your life chances. As well as being likely to lead to better wages, higher levels of education are linked with better health, wealth and  even happiness . It should be a way for children from deprived backgrounds to escape poverty.

However, our new  comprehensive study , published as part of the Institute for Fiscal Studies  Deaton Review of Inequalities , shows that education in the UK is not tackling inequality. Instead, children from poorer backgrounds do worse throughout the education system.

The report assesses existing evidence using a range of different datasets. These include national statistics published by the Department for Education on all English pupils, as well as a detailed longitudinal sample of young people from across the UK. It shows there are pervasive and entrenched inequalities in educational attainment.

Unequal success

Children from disadvantaged households tend to do worse at school. This may not be a surprising fact, but our study illustrates the magnitude of this disadvantage gap. The graph below shows that children who are eligible for free school meals (which corresponds to roughly the 15% poorest pupils) in England do significantly worse at every stage of school.

Even at the age of five, there are significant differences in achievement at school. Only 57% of children who are eligible for free school meals are assessed as having a good level of development in meeting early learning goals, compared with 74% of children from better off households. These inequalities persist through primary school, into secondary school and beyond.

Differences in educational attainment aren’t a  new phenomenon . What’s striking, though, is how the size of the disadvantage gap has remained constant over a long period of time. The graph below shows the percentage of students in England reaching key GCSE benchmarks by their eligibility for free school meals from the mid-2000s.

Over the past 15 years, the size of the gap in GCSE attainment between children from rich and poor households has barely changed. Although the total share of pupils achieving these GCSE benchmarks has increased over time, children from better-off families have been 27%-28% more likely to meet these benchmarks throughout the period.

Household income

While eligibility for free school meals is one way of analysing socio-economic inequalities, it doesn’t capture the full distribution of household income. Another way is to group young people according to their family income. The graph below shows young people grouped by decile. This means that young people are ordered based on their family’s income at age 14 and placed into ten equal groups.

The graph shows the percentage of young people in the UK obtaining five good GCSEs, and the share obtaining at least one A or A* grade at GCSE, by the decile of their family income. With every increase in their family’s wealth, children are more likely to do better at school.

More than 70% of children from the richest tenth of families earn five good GCSEs, compared with fewer than 30% in the poorest households. While just over 10% of young people in middle-earning families (and fewer than 5% of those in the poorest families) earned at least one A or A* grade at GCSE, over a third of pupils from the richest tenth of families received at least one top grade.

Inequalities into adulthood

The gaps between poor and rich children during the school years translate into huge differences in their qualifications as adults. This graph shows educational attainment ten years after GCSEs (at the age of 26) for a group of students who took their GCSE exams in 2006.

The four bars show the distribution of qualifications at age 26 separately for the entire group, people who grew up in the poorest fifth of households, those who grew up in the richest fifth of households, and those who attended private schools.

There is a strong relationship between family background and eventual educational attainment. More than half of children who grew up in the most deprived households hold qualifications of up to GCSE level or below. On the other hand, almost half of those from the richest households have graduated from university.

The gap between private school students and the most disadvantaged is even more stark. Over 70% of private school students are university graduates by the age of 26, compared with less than 20% of children from the poorest fifth of households.

Young people from better-off families do better at all levels of the education system. They start out ahead and they end up being more qualified as adults. Instead of being an engine for social mobility, the UK’s education system allows inequalities at home to turn into differences in school achievement. This means that all too often, today’s education inequalities become tomorrow’s income inequalities.

Research Economist

Imran joined the IFS in 2019 and works in the Education and Skills sector.

Comment details

Suggested citation.

Tahir, I. (2022). The UK education system preserves inequality – new report [Comment] The Conversation. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/uk-education-system-preserves-inequality-new-report (accessed: 19 November 2024).

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Cathryn Knight , University of Bristol ; Joanne Banks , Trinity College Dublin , and Noel Purdy , Queen's University Belfast

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Rachel Harding , Nottingham Trent University and Andrew Clapham , Nottingham Trent University

Maths schools top the A-level rankings – and their students only study Stem subjects

Harry Richardson , University of Leeds

Crucial topics are missing from teens’ education on sex and reproductive health in England

Rina Biswakarma , UCL ; Daniel Marcu , University of East Anglia , and Joyce Harper , UCL

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Andy Phippen , Bournemouth University