Social Segregation, Teachers, and Recruitment Gap

"It has long been recognised that schools serving disadvantaged communities are more likely to be staffed by teachers without qualified teacher status, with fewer years of experience and by non-specialist science and maths teachers. Inequality in access to suitably qualified, high quality teachers is likely to be an important contributor to the attainment gap that exists between students who come from disadvantaged families and those who do not."



According to a survey conducted among more than 7.000 primary and secondary teachers in the U.K., schools serving disadvantaged communities struggle finding qualified teachers, particularly in core subjects such as mathematics and sciences. Teachers believe that these schools involve harder work and require more skills while they prefer to teach pupils with fewer behavioural problems. However, 80% would consider a move to a school with recruitment difficulties if the conditions (pay, promotion, reduced timetable) were right (via and via).

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photograph by Henry Grant (1966) via, copyright by Henry Grant Collection and Museum of London