Jasper Common and Dan Pledger - from STEM Learning's Monitoring & Evaluation Team - investigate the shortage of specialist physics teachers...
A challenge facing education is attracting physics specialists – teachers with degree-level physics qualifications. Physics was 79% below its target for attracting teachers in 2021/22 and 83% below in 2022/23 – making it the worst performing subject in this area.
Retention of physics teachers is also difficult - in 2020, the rate of physics teachers leaving their school was 14.3% - only Maths and Computer Science have a higher percentage.
Why does it matter whether physics is taught by somebody with a physics degree, if the curriculum content is the same? The subject knowledge of a teacher has been proven to impact student attainment - as cited in this paper from the University of Muenster, this journal article and this study published in the International Journal of Science Education - and if a student wants to stretch themselves beyond the curriculum, who better than a specialist to offer more complex content? Lacking access to a physics specialist may therefore have adverse effect on students’ attainment, which could in turn harm both their prospects in physics, and their belief that physics is “for them.”
However, access to physics specialists is not equal across school characteristics. NFER found that 57% of surveyed leaders from the highest levels of disadvantage said that at least some physics lessons were taught by non-specialists, compared to 38% in the lower lowest level of disadvantage (6). Using the School Workforce Census – a dataset on English teachers – we investigated whether differences in access to a physics specialist are also present regionally.
Figure 1 shows the proportion of schools in each local authority district (LAD) that employ a physics specialist:
Missing values represent suppressed data – where there were too few physics teachers or schools. There are some lighter areas with less access to specialists in the north, and some darker areas in the south, but any trends are made murky by the high number of LADs with around 40% - 80% of schools with a physics specialist.
To shed more light on possible trends, we grouped the LADs into quartiles – four categories with a roughly even number of LADs in each – based on the data before suppression, Figure 2 here:
A lower number indicates a quartile with fewer schools with a physics specialist. We can see that many of the dark red areas – districts with the lower proportions of schools with a physics specialist – are in the north of England.
This is supported by Figure 3, which shows the distribution of LADs in each region, compared to the overall percentage from non-suppressed data (the red line – roughly 65%):
Northern regions – the North East and West, and Yorkshire and the Humber – have the majority of their LADs below average. These regions often experience higher levels of disadvantage, so these findings reveal the complex interplay between location, disadvantage and access to specialists, illuminating another brick in the wall blocking social mobility.
STEM Learning have intensive courses to support you with becoming a physics specialist. Subsidies are also available to contribute towards the costs of travel and supply cover to help teachers participate in this CPD:
Physics for non-specialists
New to teaching A level physics
Data based on data from the School Workforce Census