Exciting news! After nine months of data collection, we have had 100 responses to our primary data survey, which aims to identify the percentage of the teacher workforce on parental leave at any given time. As far as we are aware, we are the only organisation gathering this data, though we have a new Freedom of Information Act lead to pursue over the next few months.
In research terms, 100 responses validates our data, and we can therefore confidently say that 5% of the teacher workforce are on parental leave at any given time. That’s approximately 25,000 teachers.
What else do we know?
- Those on maternity leave still far outweigh those on extended paternity leave
- There are an average of 2 women on maternity leave in every school and 0.16 men on paternity leave in every school – this matches data collected by TeacherTapp this Autumn (unfortunately this couldn’t be translated into a percentage and did not differentiate between maternity and paternity leave), which is good news from a research perspective!
- This means that 93% of teachers taking parental leave are women and 7% are men
- This is disproportionate to the overall teacher workforce (primary and secondary) where 74% of teachers are female and 26% of teachers are male (School Workforce Census, 2016)
- This suggests that female teachers are still disproportionately taking on childcare responsibilities in the first year of their children’s lives
What don’t we know?
- How these statistics break down by region or type of school (i.e. primary/ secondary/ academy/ all through)
- We therefore cannot analyse factors like cost of living, school cultures or childcare costs and their impact on teachers and parental leave
- How the statistics related to part time teachers contribute to these figures
- How many male teachers leave teaching all together in order to take on childcare responsibilities
How can we do more with this data?
- We need 500 responses to make any further break down of this data valid
- If you work in a school, or have friends/ families/ colleagues in schools, please ask them to take 5 minutes to complete our survey
- We need approximately 400 more responses to explore this data further
Why is this data important?
- We strongly suspect that teachers experiences of parental leave is contributing to the teacher recruitment, retention and gender inequality in leadership crises
- However, all we know is that 6,000 female teachers aged between 30-39 are leaving the state education sector every year – that’s 27% of all teacher wastage, when retirement is not considered – quite a lot! (Policy Exchange, 2016)
- We also know that more than half of the teachers who leave teaching in order to take care of their families do not return to the classroom (NFER, 2015)
- This indicates that teaching is not a ‘family friendly’ career in many ways
- If teaching is not ‘family friendly’, then it’s not ‘anyone’ friendly – teachers deserve a life outside of school whether this be to enjoy time with family, to go to the gym, to travel or to watch entire boxsets on Netflix
- If we know the percentage of teachers affected by maternity or paternity leave then we have more leverage in bringing their experiences to big names like the DfE and funders
- We can give these teachers a voice and help to implement solutions that help them to continue to teach, if this is what they want to do
- If we can improve school cultures for parent teachers, we believe we can improve the wellbeing of all teachers and make teaching a sustainable career choice rather than the burnout train it currently is for many passionate practitioners
Thank you for all your help so far! Please keep encouraging others to complete our survey.
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