Examining Teacher Recruitment Strategies in England

Teachers around the world are in short supply; in England, teacher recruitment has been described as a ‘crisis’. For national education systems, the goal of an effective teacher recruitment strategy is not simply to attract more applicants, but to attract high quality applicants who are well-suited to teaching and are likely to remain in the profession. The goal of this article is to examine teacher recruitment strategies in England and to propose ways to improve these strategies. We begin by reviewing personnel recruitment theories and research from education and related fields. Next, we analyse publicly available teacher recruitment strategies and messages from two key education organisations in England. We then compare teacher recruitment strategies with strategies and models developed in health professions (as presented by the National Health Service [NHS]). We conclude by proposing how teacher recruitment strategies in England could be more strongly grounded in relevant theoretical and empirical work.