Commenting on the OECD’s latest Education at a Glance study, Daniel Kebede, General Secretary of the National Education Union, said:
“Fourteen years of Conservative cuts to real terms education budgets are coming home to roost. The OECD's authoritative annual report can leave the world in no doubt that UK policymakers have been damaging our international standing. The responsibility is squarely on successive Conservative governments.
“The NEU has regularly warned that England’s schools have the largest primary class sizes in Europe. The OECD comparisons show the UK as a whole has the third highest in the whole of the OECD, behind only Chile and Japan. Our ratio of pupils to teachers is the fifth highest behind only India, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. This is consequential to every child and it is galling that students are losing time with teachers. Packed classes mean less contact time with individual pupils and directly makes it harder to support each student.
“The recruitment and retention crisis, about which successive Conservative education secretaries were happy to look the other way, also has its searing legacy in today's figures. In both primary and secondary phase, the UK has the second lowest share of experienced teachers (aged 50+) in the OECD.
“We have a disproportionate percentage of teachers under 30 - some 21% - which is double both the OECD average and the EU average. England also has among the highest percentage of teachers resigning in 2022/23. This is not a sustainable situation, given the huge number who leave within five years of qualifying and the more experienced teachers who depart teaching citing burnout. These international comparisons underline that the status of the profession must be restored and making teaching attractive must be the priority if we want a successful, equal education system.
“One question which jumps out from this study is the urgency of improving the quality of work in every region of the UK in order to tackle child poverty. The regional variation in results in tests and pupil achievement can't be addressed through educational initiatives alone - it requires community renewal, and good jobs in every region.
“The previous government withdrew from TALIS, the study which underpins today's report. It means England - or in some cases the UK - are not represented in the comparative data in many cases. This omission means that we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg of the jeopardy facing the education system in England.”