CONTRIBUTORS
More pay, more funding, better recruitment: has education turned a corner?
NAOMI HOWELLS, Managing Director at Class People, explores the positive changes happening in the sector – and the challenges that remain.
For several years, conversations about the education workforce have been dominated by the same themes: teacher shortages, stretched school budgets and an increasing reliance on temporary staffing.
As we begin another academic year, however, there are some encouraging signs that the picture may finally be changing.
Teachers in England have received three consecutive significant pay awards: 6.5% in 2023/24, 5.5% in 2024/25 and a further 4% in 2025/26. School funding has also increased, while the latest recruitment figures provide perhaps the strongest cause for optimism. Secondary postgraduate teacher recruitment reached 89% of target in 2025/26, compared with around half of target just two years earlier. Teacher vacancies have also fallen, while the proportion of teachers and leaders considering leaving the profession has reduced. From where I sit, working alongside schools and education professionals every day, that progress matters.
But it would be premature to suggest the recruitment challenge has been solved.
The headline figures hide considerable variation. Recruitment remains difficult in subjects such as physics and computing, and thousands of experienced teachers continue to leave the state-funded sector each year. Perhaps most importantly, research continues to show that workload and wellbeing are among the biggest reasons teachers consider leaving.
Pay matters. Of course it does. But attracting somebody into teaching and creating an environment in which they want to remain are two very different challenges.
School expenditure tells an equally interesting story. Funding has increased considerably, but so have staffing and operating costs. Among maintained schools, supply teaching expenditure rose from £698 million in 2022/23 to £755 million in 2023/24, before falling to £682 million in 2024/25.
Could that reduction be an early indication of improving workforce stability? Possibly. But it also reminds us that recruitment, retention, funding and temporary staffing cannot be considered in isolation. This is the environment into which the new Government Commercial Agency Supply Teachers and Education Recruitment framework has arrived.
As a Lot 1 supplier, I welcome greater transparency, compliance and value for money. But good procurement cannot simply mean finding the lowest possible price.
A framework cannot create another maths teacher, SEND specialist or experienced classroom practitioner.
The real measure of value must be whether schools can access the right people, with the right skills, when their pupils need them. There are reasons to be optimistic as we enter 2026/27 and the numbers are moving in the right direction. Perhaps education is turning a corner? Our challenge now is making sure we keep going.
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Anxious absence: why wellbeing must sit at the heart of attendance strategy
EMMA SANDERSON, Managing Director of Momenta Connect – part of Outcomes First Group – discusses the link between mental health and attendance.
Persistent absence is no longer an unusual issue in schools. Official Department for Education figures released this summer put persistent absence among secondary pupils
at 23.77%, and 36.06% in special schools, meaning nearly one in four secondary-age children now misses at least a tenth of their possible sessions. Before the pandemic, that figure sat closer to one in ten. Something has fundamentally shifted in how, and why, children attend school and mental health is central to the story. A large-scale South London data-linkage study, published this year, quantifies just how strong that link is. Tracking nearly 48,000 young people, researchers found that persistently absent girls were more than twice as likely to be referred to secondary mental health services, while persistently absent boys were around 1.6 times more likely. This isn’t a marginal correlation, it’s one of the clearest predictors we have.
Crucially, the relationship runs in both directions. Anxiety can keep a child from crossing the school gate, and prolonged absence, the isolation, the lost routine, the mounting academic gap, can itself deepen anxiety and low mood. Schools that treat attendance purely as a compliance issue risk missing this feedback loop entirely, and risk making it worse with punitive responses that increase a child’s dread of school.
The data also shows this isn’t evenly spread. Pupils eligible for free school meals are more than twice as likely to be persistently absent as their peers (34.8% versus 14.1%), and pupils with SEN show a similar gap (31.3% versus 18.4%). Anxiety-related absence compounds existing disadvantages rather than appearing at random.
A 2026 systematic review of school-based interventions for persistent absence found the strongest results came not from single fixes but from coordinated, relationship-based approaches: named keyworkers who build trust with the pupil and family, flexible or phased reintegration plans, and close collaboration with mental health services rather than attendance officers working in isolation. Where anxiety is clearly the driver, evidence from CBT-based interventions shows improvements in both wellbeing and attendance together, treating the cause tends to resolve the symptom.
Three shifts are worth prioritising this term:
• Read absence data through a wellbeing lens. A pattern of Monday absences, or a spike after a lesson change, is information, not just a mark to chase up.
• Build early, low-stakes check-ins before absence becomes entrenched. Waiting for the 10% threshold to trigger action is often too late.
• Strengthen the pipeline into mental health support. Given the referral odds above, attendance leads and pastoral teams should have a direct, fast route to escalate concerns, not a generic referral form that sits in a queue.
Persistent absence figures will keep making headlines. But behind each percentage point is a pupil for whom school currently feels unmanageable. Treating attendance and mental health as one conversation, rather than two separate services, is the clearest lever we have.
October 2026
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