Recommendation 7

We asked the Department what baseline it was using to measure whether 6,500 additional teachers had been recruited. It told us it had not set a year as a baseline, but that the number of teachers would be more than before the pledge had started and that it was working on the detail as part of the Spending Review.14 It was unable to tell us how the 6,500 teachers would be distributed across schools and further education colleges, although it did say it would consider the need for skilled special educational needs teachers.15 Furthermore, the Department could not indicate how we could follow progress with the pledge, for example through milestones that would help show whether it was on track. It reiterated that it would not be able to provide further details until after the Spending Review.16 Written evidence from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation stressed the importance of “transparent reporting against the “6,500 additional teachers” pledge, broken down by sector, subject, and region”.17