Teacher recruitment policies: accelerating issues of spatial justice in England

Abstract

As well as high levels of teacher attrition, most countries around the world report some form of teacher recruitment crisis, exemplified by failed recruitment targets and high levels of demand for new teachers. These issues have reached crisis point in England. The impact of the controversial ITT Market Review, and subsequent accreditation process has left parts of the country as “cold spots” with no established providers and the formation of new national “super-providers” with no track record or experience of initial teacher education. This policy initiative is an urgent issue of spatial injustice, exacerbating teacher recruitment and supply issues in areas already suffering from educational isolation. Through the application of spatial theory, we conclude that these developments have specific spatial effects: not only on the locus of teacher education (narrowly conceived around individual classrooms and practices), and on the shifting of provision to urban centres but also on the centralisation of power and control. Such spatial effects have the capacity to exacerbate the supply and retention of teachers in hard-to-staff places.