Expanding Teaching Vacancies to further education

One distinctive thing about further education (FE) is that many of its teachers don’t begin their careers in education.

An engineering lecturer may have spent years working in manufacturing. A plumbing lecturer may have built a career in the construction industry before deciding to teach.

Colleges depend on people bringing practical experience into the classroom, but this creates a different recruitment challenge from the one faced by schools. Many people who could become excellent FE teachers aren’t actively looking for teaching jobs. Some may not even have realised that teaching is an option.

Helping those people discover opportunities is one part of the recruitment challenge. That’s why we’re expanding Teaching Vacancies to further education.

Why Teaching Vacancies?

Teaching Vacancies is the Department for Education's free recruitment service. It brings teaching and education vacancies together in one place, helping employers reach candidates and jobseekers find their next role.

Since launching in 2019, Teaching Vacancies has become the government's national recruitment service for schools. More than 90% of state-funded schools now use the service and it attracts over 800,000 jobseekers every month.

We’ve expanded the service to include school support staff, integrated it with applicant tracking systems used by larger organisations, and worked with the Department for Work and Pensions to increase the visibility of vacancies.

Each step has been driven by the same principle: making it easier for employers and jobseekers to find one another.

As we've explored how Teaching Vacancies could support further education, one finding has come up repeatedly in our user research: many people with the skills and experience colleges are looking for do not see themselves as future teachers.

Some told us they had only recently begun to consider teaching following a change in their career or personal circumstances. Others were looking for reassurance that their industry experience would be valued, even without a traditional teaching background.

This reinforced our view that helping people discover FE opportunities is just as important as making those opportunities easy for colleges to advertise.

Built with colleges

We’re now testing how our established Teaching Vacancies service works for people recruiting in further education and those looking to work in the sector.

Working with colleges has challenged some of our assumptions.

Recruitment is similar across schools and further education in some ways. But the language, roles and candidate journeys can be very different. This shows why we need to test the service with real users rather than assume that what works well for schools will automatically work for colleges.

Over the past year we’ve worked closely with colleges, recruiters and jobseekers to understand how recruitment works across the sector.

That research has shaped the service, and we’re now testing it with an initial group of colleges. This will allow us to learn from live recruitment activity before making the service more widely available. We expect to make the service more widely available by January 2027.

What happens next

Teaching Vacancies cannot solve every challenge facing further education recruitment, but it can make one important part of the process simpler.

When someone decides that teaching could be the next step in their career, they should be able to find relevant opportunities quickly, easily and through a trusted government service.

If you recruit in further education and would like to find out more, contact the team at teaching.vacancies@education.gov.uk.