Measuring Employment
The Department has improved the method to calculate the employment rates of trainee teachers, as previously outlined in the publication of the ITT Performance Profiles for academic year 2016/17. Up to and including that publication in July 2018, employment rates were estimated using survey data from the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE). This survey, which asked graduates and postgraduates where they were working six months after qualifying, has been discontinued.
From 2019 the Department changed to using internal administrative data sources to determine how many final year trainees awarded QTS go on to employment in a state-funded school in England. Trainees in the ITT census from academic year 2018/19 are matched with the relevant school workforce census (SWC) to identify which trainees went on to teach in a state-funded English school in the year following qualification to produce provisional and then revised employment rates (see details below). The SWC is a snapshot of everyone working in a state-funded school in England taken in November each year.
Employment rates derived from national trainee and school workforce data are more reliable than those from a survey sample. Rates appear lower than previously calculated from the DLHE survey because DLHE included all trainees who reported being in a teaching post in a state-funded school, independent school, college or other educational establishment in the UK or elsewhere. The new employment rates, however, are confined to the schools of greatest relevance to the department - state-funded schools in England.
For this publication, we calculate two employment rates:
- A provisional employment rate for final year trainees in the 2018/19 academic year
- A revised employment rate for final year trainees in the 2017/18 academic year
Provisional employment rate: Departmental analysis has found that matching ITT trainee data to school workforce census data from the year following qualification does not fully capture how many trainees go onto employment because some teachers do not start in time to be recorded in that SWC, while others start up to a year later. We account for these teachers by applying an uplift to the 2018/19 employment figures to estimate a provisional employment rate for 2018/19. The uplift is derived by comparing with data from previous years to determine what proportion of new teachers employed during the year were not included in their first school workforce census but were captured in the following year’s census (the uplift applied for 2018/19 was around 28% of those not captured in the first year).
Revised employment rate: We use the SWC data two years on from ITT completion to calculate a ‘revised’ employment rate that fully captures all trainees employed within 16 months of qualification.
This year, the 2017/18 revised figures also reflect a correction to the linking methodology. Last year, we captured 364 trainees who appeared in the school workforce census prior to ITT completion (296 of which were in the SWC 2017/18). These 364 trainees have been removed in the revised employment figures. The majority of those removed were on a School Direct Salaried route and so this is where the change in the revised figures is most apparent.
Data Collection
The initial teacher training performance profiles are collected each year for trainees in the final year of their ITT training. This year, the DfE has again collected data on the Database of Trainee Teachers and Providers (DTTP). The main collection period occurred from September to November 2019 but in some cases further changes were made directly by the DTTP team in agreement with providers.
The definition of final year trainees, as well as all other definitions in terms of data collected, remains the same as in ITT Performance Profiles for academic year 2017/18 (see below), so all comparisons remain valid over time.
For the academic year 2018/19, we received data from all 240 providers. This consisted of 172 SCITTs, and 68 HEIs. All data were reviewed, confirmed and signed-off by a designated person at each provider.
Coverage
The Initial Teacher Training Performance Profiles covers outcomes for final year initial teacher trainees in England for the academic year 2018/19.
Confidentiality
The Code of Practice for Official Statistics requires that reasonable steps should be taken to ensure that all published or disseminated statistics produced by the Department for Education protect confidentiality.
To do this small numbers are suppressed for sensitive characteristics and for very small providers.
This suppression approach is consistent with the Department’s statistical policy. Symbols used to identify this approach in published tables are as follows:
| Symbol | Description |
|---|---|
| 0 | Zero |
| c | Small number suppressed to preserve confidentiality |
| - | Not applicable |
Quality assurance
Data for the ITT performance profiles are completed, reviewed and signed off by a designated person at each ITT provider. The data collection and publication production teams within the Department for Education carry out a number of quality checks on the data throughout the data entry process. After data were extracted on 26th June 2020, a quality assurance process was undertaken by the publication production team. This process included detailed quality checks across the dataset.
This quality assurance process identified a small number of issues. These, along with the solutions that have been implemented, are outlined below.
- A small number of duplicate trainees and trainees whose status should have been ‘dormant’ were identified and removed; data were then validated and signed-off by the production team.
- Undergraduate degree class records were not completely transferred into the DTTP for trainees on HEI routes. In order to populate these missing fields, unique identifiers were used to match trainees from a separate HEI source to their DTTP entry. 1,148 postgraduate trainees for whom an undergraduate degree class could not be matched were recorded as unknown.
Trainees included in this release
We included a number of filters to the data received from ITT providers to ensure we capture only valid trainees. We included:
- trainees with valid records (they were not dormant, deferred or marked as a draft record)
- trainees that did not leave their course within the first 90 days
- trainees that were not excluded for other reasons (see below)
Last year, due to changes in the data collection system, we changed how we identify final year trainees for this publication using the following filters:
- if they were recorded to have left in the 2018/19 academic year
- where end dates were not recorded, we included only full-time postgraduate trainees who started in the 2018/19 academic year
Trainees excluded from this release
There are a number of trainees excluded from the mainstream ITT analysis who may be working towards QTS or another teaching qualification. The figures presented in this release do not include:
- Non-supported trainees – we exclude a small number of trainees that the provider has indicated are not eligible for UK financial support and do not have a DfE allocated place. This includes overseas trainees not entitled to UK financial support; trainees on the School Direct salaried route undertaking a non-DfE-funded subject and/or employed at an independent school; or in situations when a School Direct Salaried trainee is undertaking a subject that would not normally be funded by DfE, but the provider is funding the trainee themselves outside of their DfE allocated places.
Some trainees are excluded from the mainstream underlying data sets but are included in their own separate underlying data sets for this publication.
- Assessment Only candidates – Assessment Only is for experienced teachers with a degree and those with a teaching qualification from different countries, who have not been awarded QTS in England. It allows teachers to do the necessary assessment and skills tests to qualify for QTS without taking an ITT course.
- Early Years ITT – Trainees working towards Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS) are not included as mainstream trainees as they are not eligible for QTS. This programme focuses on pre-school initial teacher training. However, Teach First offer an early years programme working with children aged three to five years, which does lead to QTS; therefore, these trainees are included in the mainstream underlying datasets.