State colleges in England have paid recruitment businesses greater than £8 billion in fees since 2010, Labour has mentioned.
It got here as Sir Keir Starmer’s social gathering promised that its plan to deal with rising considerations over the retention and recruitment of lecturers would save taxpayers billions of kilos.
Labour has mentioned it would introduce a brand new retention fee when lecturers full the two-year early profession framework in order to deal with new lecturers leaving the job.
It additionally pledged to reinstate the requirement for brand spanking new lecturers to have or to be working in direction of certified instructor standing, amid a raft of proposals designed to maintain workers in the career.
Shadow schooling secretary Bridget Phillipson, who submitted parliamentary questions on agency fees, mentioned £1.98 billion was spent on fees by native authority-maintained colleges between April 2017 and March 2022.
Round £4.5 billion was spent between 2010 and 2017, with academies and academy trusts additionally spending £1.75 billion on fees between 2016 and 2021.
A great retention plan is the perfect recruitment plan
Shadow schooling secretary Bridget Phillipson
She accused the Conservatives of overseeing a “excellent storm” in educating.
Sir Keir will later this week set out the social gathering’s plans on colleges and schooling.
Ms Phillipson mentioned it can solely be doable to have “rising requirements in our school rooms if we get a grip on the right storm in our educating career, which is seeing an exodus of skilled lecturers and costing taxpayers over the percentages to fill vacancies”.
“Solely Labour has the imaginative and prescient to re-establish educating as a career that’s revered and valued as a talented job which delivers for our nation,” she mentioned.
“A great retention plan is the perfect recruitment plan. That’s the reason Labour’s measures to maintain lecturers in our school rooms will ship world-class lecturers in each classroom and cut back the pricey funds to recruitment businesses clobbering taxpayers.”
