Some 85 per cent of institutions surveyed by the Association of Colleges (AOC), the further education sector body, reported shortages in construction courses, 78 per cent in engineering and 62 per cent in IT and IT. The data show growing recruitment problems affecting colleges as teachers leave the profession for higher pay in the private sector, where companies are handing out bigger pay packages in an effort to fill gaps in their workforce. The research, commissioned by the Financial Times, assessed 87 colleges in England, representing around 37 per cent of the sector. Three-quarters of colleges said the main reason they were struggling to fill positions was because qualified applicants had been offered better pay elsewhere. Many principals said they were scrambling to fill dozens of vacancies, while 40 percent reported being forced to cancel classes due to staff shortages.
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Karen Spencer, principal of Harlow College in Essex, has experienced the problem first-hand. He knows there is high demand for electrical engineering courses this year, but has had to cancel his engineering apprenticeship due to staffing issues. Electrical engineers in the UK can earn more than £70,000 a year, with apprentices starting at £40,000, Spencer said, while engineering lecturers rarely earn more than £39,000. The college can’t compete with corporate salaries, he added. “You end up in this vicious cycle of competing for people and you never get that flow of workers,” Spencer said. “When you know there’s a demand for jobs and good paying jobs, you feel like something’s wrong when you can’t hire. You can’t satisfy that need.” One education provider in the North West told the AOC: “Professionals and professionals can earn a lot more money in their own specialist industry than they can on an FE teacher’s salary.” Offering better holidays and a good pension is not enough to lure people in, they added. Unlike teacher pay scales, which are set by the government, colleges decide their own staff salaries. The AOC recommends that qualified lecturers be paid between £25,000 and £39,000, falling to £21,000 for non-qualified lecturers. This month, 39 colleges voted for industrial action next term over complaints about pay and conditions. Teacher Winston Thomas teaches students about electrical circuits at Harlow College © Charlie Bibby/FT According to the AOC, college professors are paid an average of £9,000 less than teachers. It said wages in the education sector rose just 0.3 percent in the year to February, compared with 2.5 percent in the public sector and 5.4 percent in the private sector. Teachers said long-term funding cuts to further education had left them unable to offer competitive wages. Government funding for 16 to 18-year-olds at colleges in England fell by 14 per cent in the decade from 2010, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank, while overall spending on adult education fell by more than a third in the same period. “Colleges want to pay their staff more and they absolutely would if they could,” said AOC chief executive David Hughes. “It’s an outrage and it’s part of the problem with recruitment and retention issues.” As a result, the number of teaching vacancies has skyrocketed, recruiters said. Gavin Beart, chief executive of recruitment agency Reed, said the past 12 months had been the “toughest” yet for teacher recruitment, with teaching vacancies increasing by 50%. “Colleges have had a very difficult time [and] they are meant to be the answer to our skills problem,” he added. Teachers believe the problem needs a national approach, with more support from the government. “Our job is to train enough people so we don’t have national skills shortages,” said Jo Maher, principal of Loughborough College in Leicestershire. “We need some help — if it’s a national skills gap, it should be seen as a national challenge.” To address the problem, the Ministry of Education launched an awareness campaign to encourage more qualified professionals to move from industry to teaching. It said it had “supported over 700 industry professionals to train as further education teachers and plans to double that”.
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Meanwhile, some colleges are expanding classes and training professors on the job to solve the problem. John Cartwright, head of construction and the built environment at Hartlepool College in the north-east of England, said: “It’s a bigger responsibility for managers . . . there is much more hand holding. Everyone enters and everyone fills the ranks.” He noted that local bricklayers were on roughly £1,400 for four-and-a-half-day weeks, equivalent to a salary of £60,000 a year, almost double the salary of the average college professor. “Competing against the industry is really tough right now,” he said. “We want someone experienced, capable of giving our students the best experience they can [but] we can’t find anyone.”
