Councils to take advantage of free teacher recruitment service

Local authorities are being encouraged to sign up to the Department for Education’s free Teaching Vacancies service ahead of teacher resignation deadline.

All local authorities across England can now take advantage of Teaching Vacancies, the free national job listing service from the Department for Education to list vacancies on behalf of schools.

With the service set up at the request of head teachers to reduce the amount of money spent on recruitment advertising – estimated to be around £75 million each year – the move to allow local authorities to directly post teaching roles on the site promises to have a big impact on teacher recruitment in state-funded schools across England.

Local authorities can sign up now to the service and will then be able to post vacancies from early April. The open invite follows a successful pilot with 14 local authorities, including Hounslow and North Yorkshire Coast.

Data shows that 78 per cent of schools are already signed up to use the service to advertise their vacancies. The Department for Education says that the more schools use the service, the more money that could be saved and put back into classrooms.

Teaching Vacancies has attracted over 250,000 job seekers in the past month alone and, as a national service, will give local authorities the opportunity to get in front of teachers across the country and attract applications from a wider pool of quality candidates.

Recruitment teams can post as many vacancies as they want on the free service and directly publish and edit them through a personalised dashboard.

Baroness Blake, chair of the Local Government Association’s Children and Young People Board, said: “This is an excellent initiative to boost teacher recruitment and save money from the public purse to reinvest in education, and is a change local authorities have wanted to see for some time.
This service will help to ensure schools attract applications from a diverse and wider talent pool and we encourage local authority recruitment teams to engage with the service so the schools in their area can reap the benefits of it.”

James Annetts, Coastal Teacher Recruitment Project Lead (North Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area) through North Yorkshire County Council said: “We’re delighted to be working with the DfE to support schools in our areas to not only hire top teaching talent, but save money in the process. Being able to tap into a national pool of job-seeking teachers is a really great opportunity to bring fresh ideas and new teachers to the area, helping schools build on the excellent learning experience they already offer to pupils. We have successfully attracted into a key Science position at Caedmon College with the applicant seeing the job initially on the Teaching Vacancies site.”