ITE Census 2025: Who will be the teachers of tomorrow?

ITE Census 2025: Who will be the teachers of tomorrow?

The publication of the Initial Teacher Training census will no doubt lead to a flurry of headlines: recruitment up here, down there, and shortages in familiar subjects. But if you look beyond the top line numbers, there is a much more complex picture of who is entering the classroom, where, and what support they need to thrive.

Recent analyses from NFER’s Teacher Labour Market in England Annual Report 2025 and the Teaching Commission’s Shaping the Future of Teaching both describe teacher supply as “perilous”, with recruitment still below target in key subjects and rising vacancies and non-specialist teaching concentrated in more disadvantaged areas. Against that backdrop, the ITT census isn’t just a recruitment snapshot – it’s part of a much wider workforce story.

With Ofsted’s updated Initial Teacher Education inspection framework placing more emphasis on inclusion and self-evaluation, it can be tempting to treat the census as just an artefact of recruitment and applications. We think it’s better used as a prompt for reflection, a dataset that can help improve the experience and outcomes of trainees and pupils.

So what are some of the stories behind this year’s figures – and what should ITE/ITT providers be thinking about?

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1.Intake continues to shift

Sex and phase are not just a pipeline problem

Recent ITE application data showed a sizable jump in the conversion rate of male trainee applications, with a 12% increase in the number of men accepting places on teacher training courses but this has not shifted the gender balance in ITE from70% female. Additionally, in the wake of discussions following the Adolescence TV series, Bridget Phillipson MP, the Secretary of State for Education, called for more male teachers to act as role models for disaffected boys.

The ITE census shows a shrinking pool of male primary trainees’ with fewer male primary trainees in 2025, against a backdrop of falling pupil rolls and more challenging placement. Workforce data suggests the problem doesn’t stop at recruitment: historically, male primary teachers have been consistently more likely to leave the profession than women, by around a percentage point a year on average over the past decade. Even as the gap has narrowed recently, men remain slightly more likely to leave early. So, when we talk about the gender balance in primary, it’s not just a pipeline problem – it’s a retention problem too.

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Disability and disclosure

The proportion of trainees declaring a disability has risen to 20% in 2025. On the surface that suggests the profession is becoming more inclusive though with concern disabled trainees are almost twice as likely not to achieve QTS. At the same time, disclosure rates have fallen to around 92% from 99% six year ago, which means we’re seeing more trainees with declared disabilities and a non-trivial minority choosing not to disclose.

For ITE providers, this has direct implications for how you approach reasonable adjustments, workload, mentoring and wellbeing. Many ITE providers and placement schools will have already observed trainees requiring more support, an issue brought front and centre in the Ofsted framework on how ITE providers are creating inclusive, high-expectation environments for all trainees.

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Ethnic diversity continues

There has been real movement on ethnic diversity overall: the ITE population has shifted from about 19% Black, Asian and other non-white ethnic backgrounds in 2019/20 to around 31% by 2024/25, somewhat mirroring changes in the graduate population but also reflecting significant change in ITE. Under the surface there are notable variations across geographies, higher education and school-based routes.

This matters to ITE providers as the Ofsted framework explicitly expect providers to be able to articulate how they’re contributing to a diverse, high-quality workforce and meeting local and national needs. If selection and support aren’t designed with that in mind, you can easily create or widen inequities within your own programmes.

Mission 44’s are already investing in rethinking ITE recruitment and selection through an anti-racist lens, recognising that while ethnic minority candidates are often over-represented in applications, they remain under-represented in the workforce. The National Institute of Teaching recently found online interviews perform broadly as well as in-person ones, but that ethnicity and format can interact in subtle ways – a reminder that widening access through flexible selection also means watching carefully for new biases.

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Degree classifications stalling

Degree classis a poor proxy for teacher quality, but the trends are still instructive.

Whilst first-class degrees have become markedly more common in the wider graduate population, ITE has not fully realised that grade inflation, despite a large majority of entrants being recent graduates. In fact, the proportion of first and upper second-class honour degrees has fallen to 71%, the lowest on record. When compared to the undergraduate degree awards whilst we have seen the proportion of first-class degrees in ITE move, ITE’s share of firsts has fallen behind:

• In 2016, 18% of trainees held first-class degrees compared to 20% of all degrees awarded nationally in the previous year
• By 2025, 22% of trainees held firsts compared to about 30% nationally.

Subject-level patterns are notable too, with the proportion of STEM trainees with firsts remaining flat at 23% with the share with a 2:1 and above falling to 65%, the lowest on record. Amongst physics trainees, just 16% hold a first compared to 33% a few years prior, and just one in two physics trainees are holding a 2:1 degree or above. Comparatively, English is in a far different place, with a 23% entering teacher training with a first-class degree and 81% an upper second-class degree or above.

None of this means quality is falling as being an effective early-career teacher is about much more than degree class, but it does underline the need for ITE providers to ensure they understand how they are marketing, attracting and supporting the diverse academic profiles of their cohorts (which can vary from subject to subject), and to match curriculum and support accordingly.

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Apprenticeships not the golden bullet (yet)

Postgraduate Teaching Apprenticeships (PGTA) starts have flattened in 2025 to a little over 2,000. That’s almost a ten-fold increase in six years, but with only around 7%growth this year the route is now adding volume at the margins rather than making a meaningful dent in the overall teacher supply challenge. There is also the question of the diversity and inclusion within the cohort, and where there are relative hot and cold spots of PGTA provision. The undergraduate Teacher Degree Apprenticeship has begun across a handful of providers with 181 trainees across nine providers, though that is nowhere near the scale needed to shift the dial on supply, particularly in shortage subjects.

That profile might be entirely appropriate if these routes are genuinely opening doors for career-changers or providing an undergraduate option, securing those who wouldn’t otherwise train; however, at the moment, the numbers suggest we’re adding modest volume.

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Reflections for ITE leaders

As you look at this year’s census alongside your own data, a few practical prompts:

• Representation: How does your cohort compare to local, regional and national patterns by sex, ethnicity, disability and degree class, and to the communities your partner schools serve
• Conversion and progression: Where are the biggest drop-off points between application, offer, start and QTS for different groups and subjects? Do you have a clear understanding of how this intersects with trainees’ backgrounds and experiences?
• Subject and phase hotspots and cold spots: In subjects, what is driving changes in attraction and recruitment - and how are you adapting your marketing and offer?
• Experience and equity: Do trainees with different characteristics report similar experiences of belonging, workload, mentoring quality and support – or are there systematic gaps?

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How ImpactEd can help

At ImpactEd Evaluation, we work with providers and system organisations to join up exactly these kinds of questions, co-designing evaluation frameworks, building practical data rhythms, and translating insight into improvement plans.

Our work with a consortium of four Teaching School Hubs in the Midlands exemplifies how we help partners understand their impact: co-designing a simple, evidence-informed evaluation framework and supporting them to systematically gather the perspectives of trainees, teachers and leaders.

For ITE providers specifically, we can support you to:

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1. Develop your self-evaluation framework

• Examine your performance, curriculum, mentoring and QA to surface the key questions you should be asking about inclusion, achievement, equity and impact.
• Build your internal capacity and develop a streamlined evaluation framework you can realistically maintain year on year to drive your improvement effort.

2. Benchmark against the sector

• Provide insights on your provision’s representation, QTS and employment outcomes by phase, route, subject and trainee characteristics.
• Highlight where inequities are emerging and where you are leading national trends.

3. Capture lived experience of trainees, mentors and colleague

• Design and run trainee and mentor surveys on belonging, inclusion, workload and development across the programme.
• Analyse differences in experience between groups and routes and build feedback loops so that insights drive tangible changes.

4. Turn insight into a clear improvement story

• Translate evidence into a concise, honest self-evaluation and a focused set of improvement priorities with clear measures of success.
• Help you feel confident that you are a provider who understands its context and uses data and stakeholder feedback well.

To discuss the impact of your teacher training strategy and provision, please get in touch.

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