'Assessing labour market shortages, a methodology update' and 'Partial review of teacher shortages' published by MAC
The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) last week released two new reports.
Image credit: UK GovernmentThe 34-page report Assessing labour market shortages, a methodology update is available here and assesses the methodology used to identify labour shortages in skilled occupations to date.
The 170-page report Partial review of teacher shortages is here and it examines whether there is a shortage of teachers or teachers in specific subjects to fill through non-European Economic Area (EEA) migration.
The report on assessing labour shortages outlines amendments to the methodology used to bring it up to date with the latest labour market trends and available data sources, including additional indicators to identify labour market shortages, using new web-scraped data to replace obsolete Jobcentre Plus vacancy data, and changes to the thresholds used to decide whether an indicator is indicative of shortage.
Professor Alan Manning, MAC's chairman, says in the report's foreword: "The need for a new set of indicators is partly forced on us by discontinuation of the occupation-level vacancy statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions on which we used to rely. But this represents an opportunity as well as a problem as, increasingly, fewer vacancies are advertised through job centres, especially for the graduate-level occupations that are the only ones allowed under Tier 2. In place of these vacancy statistics we are now using data from Burning Glass, which scrapes job advertisements off the web. This data has only been collected for a few years and the methodology is continually improving so that our current use should be thought of as experimental rather than definitive. But we do think this type of data source for vacancies offers the prospect of being more reliable and available both at a finer-grained level and in real time."
The MAC report on whether teachers should be included on the UK shortage occupation list (SOL) was commissioned last year by the Home Office.
The report concludes: "Secondary school teachers in maths, physics and chemistry are presently included on the SOL. We found that teachers in maths and physics met our shortage and sensible methodological test but that there was not sufficient evidence of a shortage of chemistry teachers."
"Of the other teaching subjects that we looked at in detail, we found that teachers in computer science, Mandarin and general science met our shortage and sensible test. Teachers in modern foreign languages were found to be in shortage but we concluded that it was not sensible to seek to fill shortages in teachers of European languages from outside of Europe … We did not find sufficient evidence of a shortage of primary and nursery teachers, nor of teachers in special schools."
The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) trade union said in response to the report: "We are deeply disappointed by the Migration Advisory Committee's failure to recognise the growing teacher shortage crisis, despite compelling evidence from ATL and other unions. This crisis will get worse with the bulge in pupil numbers, make it hard for schools to find a teacher for every class and risk the quality of education for children and young people in England."
"We currently need trained and qualified teachers from other countries to enable schools to put enough excellent and prepared teachers in front of our classrooms … The Committee's failure to stop the loss of highly qualified overseas teachers may well be the straw to break the backs of our underfunded schools."