Teacher demographics

It is known that the computing teacher population is predominantly male (DfE 2024). There has also been speculation about the overall number of teachers (British Computer Society 2022; Royal Society 2019), though figures here remain rough, as the school workforce census records ICT and computer science teachers separately, when these two sets of teachers may include significant overlap - the curriculum subject is computing which includes both ICT and computer science. This section looks to expand the understanding of computing teachers by finding the overall number of teachers of computing and looking at other demographic details such ethnicity.

1 Overall teacher numbers

The number of unique teachers teaching any lessons in computing declined steeply between 2011 (n=12,218) and 2022 (n=8,435), a 31% decrease. With a slight recovery from the lowest numbers in 2019 (n=8,176) has been a slight recovery since. However, numbers will be higher as the census doesn’t report on all school types and not all computing teachers will be teaching in the census period each year. Read these figures in conjunction with overall census response rates, please see the Methodology.

Figure 1.1: based workforce taught per subject, 2010 = 100

When looking at the number of unique teachers in each key stage we can see that the number of teachers in key stage 3 is higher than key stage 4 and key stage 5. This is likely due non-dedicated computing teachers being given key stage 3 computing lessons outside their core subject lessons. The number of teachers in key stage 3 has been relatively stable since 2017, with 7,348 teachers in 2022, down from 10,619 in 2011. At key stage 4 there were 4,536 teachers in 2022 down from 8,526 in 2011; and at key stage 5 there were 2,627 teachers in 2022, down from from 3,673 in 2011:

Figure 1.2: head count by subject and keystage

Figure 1.3: number of unique teachers teaching any lessons in given subject, by year group and overall

2 Teacher experience

When looking at the number of years teaching computing by years of overall teaching, you can see that there is a large flux of teachers moving in and out of teaching the subject. This is different from other subjects. For those teachers who have two years overall teaching experience and who have taught computing within these two years, only 59 % of them taught computing in both years. This is in contrast to Design and Technology where this is 75% and Maths where this is 81 %. For those teachers with 11 years teaching experience, only 36 % of them taught computing for all 11 years. This contrasts with Design and Technology where this is 66 % and Maths where this is 71 %.

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3 Teacher gender

The % of computing teachers who are female fell slightly from 43 % in 2010 to 41 % 2022. The overall percentage of females is well below that seen in other STEM subjects.

Figure 3.1: % of teachers female in each subject

When looking at the gender of computing teachers by year group, exam years are more likely to have male teachers, with roughly 35 % of key stage 4 and key stage 5 teachers being female, compared for 41 % of key stage 3.

Figure 3.2: % of teachers female in each year subject, by year group

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4 Teacher ethnicity

BAME teachers form a larger percentage of the computing teacher cohort than they do the overall teacher cohort. In 2022, 26 % of computing teachers identified as BAME, compared to 20 % of all teachers. 31 % of taught computing hours were delivered by BAME teachers.

Figure 4.1: percentage of subject teachers who identify as BAME

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5 Head teacher gender

Across all key stages schools with a male head teacher were more likely to timetable computing in the census week than those with female head teachers. This might be due to female head teachers being more likely to be in all girls’ schools, where computing exam offerings are generally lower. Please see the the Computing provision report for more information on school types offering qualifications, and the Taught hours section for general provision of computing at key stage 3.

Figure 5.1: percentage of providers offering computing in the census week, by keystage and gender of head teacher

References

British Computer Society. 2022. “BCS Landscape Review: Computing Qualifications in the UK.” Technical Report. https://www.bcs.org/media/8665/landscape-review-computing-report.pdf.

DfE. 2024. “Statistics: School Workforce.” https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.

Royal Society. 2019. “Policy Briefing on Teachers of Computing - Recruitment, Retention and Development.” The Royal Society. https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/Publications/2019/21-08-19-policy-briefing-on-teachers-of-computing.pdf.