Staff attendance is important – but it’s also really important that students are there too! Particularly those who might need a bit of extra help navigating the implications of their results if they missed their target grades. This year, experts voiced worries that a new Government-backed app delivering results to students digitally would see students stay away from schools. Fortunately, this didn’t seem to have a significant impact on in-person attendance, with two-thirds saying numbers were the same as last year, 17% noticed higher numbers compared to previous years, and 16% reported they had lower numbers than usual.

A question mark hangs over the current resit policy that requires students who do not achieve a grade 4 in GCSE English or maths to retake the exam, with plans to introduce a new level 1 “stepping stone” qualification. But how do teachers feel about the policy? In 2024, 58% of English teachers supported the resit policy; today, that has dropped to 51%. It’s a similar pattern in maths, where 59% supported the policy, and now that has dropped to 54%.

Those that argue resits should be kept will sometimes point to data around the reasons why a person might become ‘NEET’ (not in work or education). For example, a report by NATCEN says students without GCSEs are more likely to be out of work and education, when compared to those with GCSEs (young people who did not achieve any GCSEs were over five times more likely to experience a period of NEET than those who achieved five or more).

However, not everyone agrees that qualifications are the best way to prevent future unemployment. In the Government-commissioned report into Young People and Work authored by the Rt Hon Alan Milburn, he puts forward a different perspective.

In the report, Milburn says, “there seems to be emerging evidence that educational qualifications on their own, are becoming less protective against the risk of young people becoming NEET” and points out that the “growth in the proportion of NEET young people with A Level qualifications or above has outpaced the rise in the proportion of young people attaining those qualifications overall”. Milburn says one explanation for this increase may be because parts of the schools system “are not sufficiently developing students’ capabilities or work readiness.”.

Once more details on these plans for change emerge, expect more questions on Teacher Tapp to ensure we’re amplifying the voice of the professionals, as changes happen to the assessment system 📣.

NEETs in primary

In an interview speaking about the report, Mr Milburn made a recommendation that primary school teachers should be involved in spotting students who might eventually be NEET. He told The Guardian: “The warning signs are there from a very early, early age. Definitely primary schools should be identifying children who are at risk of being NEET.

“Secondary schools and other services should be intercepting, intervening, supporting and helping those young people to get on a different path.”

Opinions from primary schools are mixed on this suggestion: 44% agree it would be useful, but 56% disagree.

Secondary teachers are similarly divided; when asked how useful it would be to have an incoming Year 7 student flagged as at risk of NEET, 38% would find it useful, 26% wouldn’t find it useful, and 36% wouldn’t want students flagged this early.

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The plans don’t have many details so far, but the idea is that from Year 10, students will have the option to study vocational qualifications alongside GCSEs in English and maths. Part of the push behind these plans is to tackle the high number of young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs). Data published this year showed more than one million young people across the UK fall into this category, the highest level in more than 12 years.

How do teachers feel about this announcement? 24% said they hadn’t yet seen the plans, but among those who had, 67% felt positive, 23% felt neutral, and 10% felt negatively about the plans.

How many students currently have the option to choose vocational qualifications in Year 10? 57% of secondary leaders reported that this is the arrangement at their school. 12% only give this option to certain students, and a further 3% restrict it further by selecting students themselves to study these qualifications. However, for some, there is no option at all, with 27% of secondary leaders saying they have no vocational qualifications offered at Key Stage 4.

The next questions are for the Department for Education to answer: how will these courses be delivered? And what might it mean for the teachers of subjects other than English and maths?

Has this announcement If you think of a question you would like Teacher Tapp to put to its teachers, please get in touch England@teachertapp.co.uk 📧.

Last week, a Teacher Tapper got in touch to ask if we could find out about the use of support plans in schools, and specifically, whether or not they led to teachers leaving the school.

Of course, we were happy to help. Support plans are tricky for teachers to talk about and many worry that admitting they've been on one will make them judged by colleagues

The great thing about Teacher Tapp is we can ask, and people can speak freely about their experience without worrying they will be judged.

However, one issue we did flag before we put this question to our Tappers is the higher chance of receiving positive comments about support plans. After all, if they’re still in the app and tapping, that would suggest they have stayed in the classroom and have had a positive experience.

How common are support plans?

The number of teachers reporting they had been on a support plan was relatively small, with 2% telling us they had been on an informal support plan in the last year, and 12% telling us they had been in the past.

Looking for trends to see if some teachers are more likely to have been put on support plans than others, we found teachers in primary and secondary were just as likely to report having been on support plans. We also didn’t see a difference when we checked whether the teacher currently on a support plan was in an academy or a local authority school.

Men were more likely to tell us they had been on a support plan than women (18% vs 12%). Only 6% of senior leaders told us they had been on a support plan, compared to 16% of classroom and middle leaders.

What happens after the plan?

The Tapper who got in touch specifically wanted to know if the support plan led to the teacher leaving the school. Keeping in mind the point we made before that our sample is slightly skewed by not including those who have left the classroom altogether, we discovered:

• 31% stayed at the school and are NOT looking for work elsewhere

• 7% stayed but are job hunting elsewhere

• 27% left because of the support plan

• 33% left, but not because of the support plan

• 2% felt it was too soon to say

What else did we learn?

We asked if those who had experienced support plans had any other comments; more than 500 Tappers wrote in to share their thoughts, and many of them picked up on what they saw as the flaws in the system:

Forced out, not helped: “It is a type of bullying used by SLT to get rid of teachers they do not like. There is no objective view on it – only their subjective view, which is difficult to fight. It was not supportive – it was threatening”. Another teacher described it bluntly: “It wasn’t supportive at all. It was a ‘we want you out’ plan”

No real support: “People just liked to keep saying I’ll observe you again, without actually providing tips on how to improve. They would say what they wanted to see, but not how to do it or why it should be done that way”

Health toll: “An awful experience designed to drive me out of the school I ended up with a bleeding ulcer and panic attacks”

Unions mattered: “I only survived because of excellent union support who tied them in knots and a member of SLT suddenly seeing what was happening to me and putting in a grievance”

ECTs/NQTs hit hardest: “I was an ECT & they hadn’t given me the proper induction process, decided I wasn’t meeting expectations & put me on their own support plan rather than doing anything in line with my ECT programme”

The good news is it wasn’t all bad – there were also some positive responses: “It was genuinely supportive & helpful. My mentor is still a close friend. I stayed at the school for another 9 years!”

Hot classrooms. In my time in the classroom, I’ve taught in: sweatboxes built in the 1970s with windows that have no blinds and don’t open; new builds with supposed “cool flow” air ventilation that were boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter; and then the year I had a bank of computers at the back of the room, so an air-conditioning unit kept everything beautifully cool.

My gut feeling is that the temperature impacts the behaviour of the class - but what does the data say?

Disruptions in “too hot” classrooms

At the end of June, as temperatures began to rise, we asked our regular behaviour question and found those teaching in classrooms that were “far too hot” were more likely to report disruptions when compared to teachers in classrooms that were “about right” (61% vs 44% in primary and 49% vs 36% in secondary).

Last week we repeated the experiment and found that classroom teachers were once again more likely to report poor behaviour if they were in hotter classrooms: 50% vs 39% for primary teachers and 39% vs 32% for secondary teachers.

The main differences this time are that the number of teachers reporting disruptions is smaller with a 5 percentage point drop for both phases, and that the proportional gaps between those in “too hot” and “about right” classrooms have shifted – in short, the temperature of the classroom has made a difference, but less of a difference when compared to June, when we were right at the start of the heatwave.

Those in “too cold” classrooms were too small in number to include this time, so they have been excluded, but we don’t expect it will be very long until cold classrooms become the new problem.

Are hot classrooms hotbeds for disruptive behaviour? Or does the heat change our perception of behaviour?

Ultimately, all we can report is whether or not teachers experienced disruptive behaviour in their last lesson, and whether or not their classroom felt “too hot” or “about right”.

One explanation for the higher reports of disruption in the hotter classrooms might be that the heat impacted student behaviour. But that’s just one explanation.

Another could be perception: the heat hasn’t changed the behaviour of the students, but rather the teachers’ tolerance for the behaviour. The same behaviour that on another day, a cooler, milder day, might have been tolerated. But in the heat, when dehydrated and uncomfortable, the teacher views it differently.

And of course, it’s worth asking questions about the types of classrooms that become too hot. Are these classrooms ones that have poor insulation? Are they in need of repairs? Unsuitable for the size of the class? Is it the classroom itself that is the problem, not just that it’s too hot, but that it’s unsuitable in other ways?

If we dig into this further, what else should we ask? And what are your theories about the heat-behaviour connection?

First impressions:

• 23% think a partially funded 3.5% increase is the right amount

• 61% think it’s not enough

• 1% think it’s too much

• 16% don’t know yet

Not overwhelmingly enthusiastic, but at this point in the term, when everyone’s this worn out, that’s perhaps a given.

So we turned to a trickier question: if this is all the money on the table, what would teachers actually prefer it was spent on?

This matters because funding is the real sticking point for many teachers – especially those balancing the budget. After all, some would argue that any pay increase without funding just becomes cuts elsewhere.

Given the choice, teachers would prefer:

6% – give the school the 1.7% and let it decide how to spend it

45% – a fully funded 1.7% increase instead

37% – the current offer (3.5%, partially funded)

11% – no preference.

Given they have to wrangle the budget, you might have thought senior leaders would be the most likely to want the smaller pay rise, but in fact, when we checked the breakdowns there was very little difference between the opinions of classroom teachers and senior leaders: similar numbers opted for a 3.5% rise (37% classroom teachers vs 38% senior leaders) and the same pattern for 1.7% fully-funded rise (45% classroom teachers vs 47% senior leaders).

Will teachers strike?

One way to judge the reaction of the teachers is to compare it to previous years. In July 2022, we asked teachers “How do you feel about the overall proposed 2022/23 teachers’ pay award of 5%?”, and found 6% strongly agreed with the offer, 35% felt disappointed, but thought it necessary in the circumstances, 28% disagreed with the offer, 19% felt angry about the offer, and 12% felt unsure.

Following the July 2022 pay deal, teachers took strike action, and with more angry teachers this year, teaching unions might expect a stronger turnout when their ballots go out later this year.

Another announcement included in the pay rise was that the maximum salary for trust CEOs will be capped at £170,000. This is a topic we have asked about many times in the past, with the most recent findings reporting that 39% of teachers believe the cap should be £100,000, and 32% feel it should be no more than £150,000.

What are your thoughts on the pay deal? Comment below if you have other questions you think we should be asking on Teacher Tapp.

So far this year, this is the highest report of disruption in secondary, and the second highest report in primary, just one percentage point lower than the 49% reported in November and February.

Is this normal? It’s slightly higher than what we have seen in the past: 2026 has the highest number of classroom teachers reporting disruption of any June to date. When we first asked about disruptions in the classroom in the month of June in 2022, 30% of primary and 29% of secondary classroom teachers reported that behaviour had stopped learning in their classroom. The second-highest figures came in June 2024 for primary (43%) and June 2023 for secondary (37%).

With weather forecasters predicting that this June is going to break records for high temperatures, we wondered if the weather was playing a part in this. To find out, we looked to see if teachers in warmer classrooms faced more disruptions. To do this, we asked classroom teachers about the temperature in their classroom – and those teaching in classrooms that were “too hot” were more likely to report disruptions when compared to teachers in classrooms that were “about right” (61% vs 44% in primary and 49% vs 36% in secondary).

There were a very small number of teachers who reported their classroom was “too cold”; however, because this was such a small group, we had to exclude them from the results, as their sample size meant we couldn’t compare them to the other groups.

Could this be explained by teachers in classrooms who have classrooms that are too hot, and are the ones who experience poor behaviour anyway? Possibly – just because the teachers in hot classrooms reported more disruptions, that doesn’t mean the hot classroom was to blame!

We’ll be carrying on with our classroom temperature check with our future behaviour questions to keep an eye on the pattern…

Read about more of our findings in the Teacher Tapp blog.

How are you finding behaviour this week? Comment below and let us know…

Based on some of the questions Tappers have been sending in about interviews, we had a feeling that some schools are still getting this wrong. To check, we asked about the different protected characteristics to check how common it was for teachers to be asked about these subjects. The good news is that the vast majority have not been asked these questions (82%), however, 7% have been asked about health conditions or disabilities, and 6% have been asked about marital status. 6% were asked about sickness absence and 5% were asked about children or caring responsibilities.

Some groups appear to be more likely to be asked about certain topics than others: women in their 30s are most likely to be asked about having children (5%) or caring responsibilities (8%) compared to men and women in their 50s, who were least likely (0% and 2%).

Men in their 50s were more likely than women in their 50s to be asked about retirement plans (9% vs 5%).

The interview lesson observation

When leaders were asked which part of the interview they felt was the most useful indicator for future performance, both primary and secondary leaders felt it was the interview lesson that gave them the best insights (56% and 46%). But how best to set up the (clearly important!) interview lesson?

We set out to find out the approach to interview lesson observations favoured by teachers, and asked if they preferred to be observed teaching a lesson at the interview school, or record themselves teaching, or be observed with their own pupils by a teacher from the school they are interviewing for.

The top choice for primary teachers was to be observed with their own pupils by a teacher visiting from the school they are interviewing for (37%), and over in secondary, the top choice was to be observed at the interview school with their pupils (46%). The least popular choice in both phases was recording yourself teaching (4% in primary and 3% in secondary).

The really good news is that 27% of primary and 30% of secondary teachers don’t have strong feelings about how their interview lesson observations are done. Perhaps you’ve always taken the same approach with your interview lessons and not considered other options. In your opinion, is there a preferred approach that gives the best indicator of the quality of teaching? Or is it purely a logistical decision? Share your thoughts in the comments…

In the comments, teachers were sharing their thoughts and opinions were split. Some thought it would be fine, others thought it was best avoided. Some people shared personal experience, with stories of sons and daughters who struggled to accept the parent in the role of teacher, and others who had taken it in their stride.

We thought this was a perfect question to run a small experiment: Teacher Tappers were split into four groups, one group heard the scenario with a male teacher, male child; another group male teacher, female child; third group female teacher, male child; final group had a female teacher and female child. We wanted to know if these differences elicited different responses.

Reassuringly, there were only very small differences between responses! Here is what we found out…

We found out that Tappers are more likely to recommend a swap for daughters than sons if the teacher parent is male (69% vs 65%), and then less likely when the teacher parent is female (66% vs 68%).

Does the Tapper’s gender make a difference? A little. Men were more likely than women to say they “couldn’t advise” — an 8-percentage-point gap on average. Men were also slightly more likely to advise teaching the child themselves, with an average gap of around 3 points. The widest single gap was on advising the father to teach his daughter himself: 14% of men chose this versus 8% of women.

Elspeth Kirkman is the chief programmes officer at Nesta, and as part of her work looks at education and how to close income-driven gaps in the early years. She is the author of two books: Behavioral Insights (2020) and Decisionscape (2024). She holds fellowships with King’s College London and Exeter University. Plus – she has a TikTok channel where she breaks down research papers.

We shared these findings with Elspeth, and she shared our surprise there wasn’t more of a gap, saying, “I am surprised, but pleasantly so, by how little effect the sex of the teacher and their child seems to have on the advice given. I am not sure what direction I would have expected it to go in but I would have thought Dads would get different advice to Mums.”

However, she did add that she hadn’t expected the gender of the respondent to move the numbers as much as they did, and that the reason for the shift was “driven by a big increase in people saying they wouldn’t want to advise rather than taking a view.”.

Do the results surprise you? Let us know what you think England@teachertapp.co.uk.

Read the rest of this week’s blog here.

Whether or not you were paid a TLR made very little difference to tasks like planning or updating schemes of work (68% paid for a TLR vs 62% not paid for a TLR), but delivering CPD had the biggest gap (74% vs 51%), followed by analysing pupil data (65% vs 45%).

What does this tell us about subject leadership expectations? Well, firstly, yes, those being paid TLRs are expected to do more (which is exactly what we expected to find) but the high numbers still expected to undertaken tasks like organising CPD (51%) and analysing and reporting data (45% analysing, 51% reporting) reveals a significant number who have all of the accountability but none of the financial recompense.

With shrinking pupil numbers and pressures on budgets, cuts to TLRs might be a choice school leaders have to make – but are there ways to reduce the expectations for subject leadership without compromising on quality of learning? If you’re a school leader who has found a solution, or a teacher in a school who feels your system for dealing with subject leadership works well, we would love to hear from you! Please write in 📧 England@teachertapp.co.uk.

Read more on our blog here.

Before Sats tests began, we checked in with year six teachers to see if they had completed all their work during timetabled lessons: 15% of year six teachers had “comfortably” completed all the work for SATs during timetabled lessons, 54% had “just about” squeezed it in, and 31% didn’t.

Unsurprisingly, whether or not you’ve covered the content appears to have an impact on your wellbeing: teachers who hadn’t covered all the SAT content were almost twice as likely as teachers who had covered the content to report feeling under strain “all of the time” (16% vs 9%).

And it’s not just the year six teachers and senior leaders who are feeling the impact of Sats: over half of teachers reported losing a teaching assistant or learning support assistant because of the tests (59%).

Maladministration ⛔️

Although the rules around taking KS2 Sats are relatively relaxed when compared to exams taken by older pupils, there are rules about what teachers can and can’t do. We checked to see how many teachers involved in the tests have done things that would count as maladministration, or have been encouraged to do them.

The good news: most teachers (85%) have NEVER done or been encouraged to engage in practice that would count as maladministration.

Of the 15% of HAVE, reports of maladministration included:

• 46% Using a reader or a scribe when that isn’t their normal classroom practice

• 27% Gave extra time

• 26% Sounded spellings in a helpful way (e.g. ex-tin-gu-ish)

• 48% Pointed out an incorrect answer

• 5% Gave an answer to a pupil, and 1% amended papers after they had been completed

• 25% Another type of maladministration

Secondary teachers told us they hear about maladministration via the students, with about a third reporting that a student has told them about teachers breaking the rules: 7% have heard reports of extra time; 26% heard students say a teacher told them the right answer; 24% heard of another incident that counts as maladministration if it were true.

Student distress 😢

Sadly, a large number of teachers once again reported that students reacted badly to the SATs. Overall, more than two-thirds (68%) of primary teachers saw students showing signs of upset or distress because of the tests. This is a similar level to 2025 when it was 66%, but an improvement on 2024, when it was 81%.

Teachers in schools with the most pupils eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) were more likely to report seeing distressed students than those in the least deprived schools (74% vs 59%).

Teachers in schools that ran extra SATs preparation sessions were also more likely to report student distress than those in schools that didn’t (76% vs 68%).

This raises an obvious question: are those extra sessions simply more common in deprived schools, which already show higher distress? The data suggests not. Even among schools with the highest FSM levels, teachers in schools running extra sessions were still more likely to report distressed students than those in schools that didn’t (82% vs 71%).

KS2 Sats and attendance ❎

One big worry for teachers is attendance during the Sats – but how common is it for parents to keep children at home?

It’s unfortunately relatively common, with over one in ten teachers reporting being aware of students who had been kept home because of the KS2 tests. This is a question we have been tracking pre- and post-pandemic. In 2019, the number of teachers reporting that students had been kept home was much lower, at 4%. After the return, it slowly increased: 9% in 2022; 11% in 2023; 15% in 2024; 10% in 2025; and 12% in 2026.

These figures track with the data from the Department for Education tracking attendance in primary both pre- and post- pandemic. In 2018/19, overall absence in primary was 4.03%, and then after the pandemic rose to 6.26% in 2022/23, and the most recent figures show it to be 5.20% in 2024/25. This speaks to a much larger issue of attendance in school, rather than being isolated to just the KS2 tests.

Between 2019 and 2023, the experience of student absence reported by teachers in schools with lower numbers of students on FSM was very similar to that of teachers in schools with higher numbers of students on FSM. However, in 2024 and 2025, the numbers reporting student absence changed, with teachers in schools with higher levels of FSM becoming more likely to report absence (12% vs 17% in 2024, 8% vs 11% in 2025). However, this year, levels have once again come in line with one another.

In 2019, the practice was more common with 75% of primary school teachers and 75% of secondary school teachers reporting they gave attendance awards.

By 2022, this figure had dropped to 46% among primary teachers, and another drop (but not quite as severe) among secondary teachers (64%).

Between 2022 and 2026, the figures stayed pretty steady in primary, and today, 47% of primary teachers report their school uses attendance awards. In secondary, there has been a slow but steady increase, and today 74% of secondary teachers say their school uses attendance awards.

However, this is far from the full picture.

Comparing the responses of teachers in schools with the fewest students on Free School Meals (FSM) to teachers in schools with the highest percentage of students on FSM, there is a significant difference in approach to attendance certificates.

31% of primary teachers in the most affluent schools report use of attendance awards vs 74% in the most deprived schools.

Same pattern in secondary: 74% of secondary teachers in the most affluent schools say their school uses awards, vs 93% of secondary teachers in the most deprived areas.

And it seems like handing out certificates is much more common in state schools: just 11% of teachers in private schools told us they use attendance awards.

We know attendance is a top priority for the Department for Education; their recent report shared that there has been a rise in persistent absence, where students are missing more than 10% of the time.

“The number of children who are persistently absent has nearly doubled since the pandemic, although it is falling, from 21.2% in 2022/23 to 20% in 2023/24,” the report said.

It also noted that “severe absence – meaning missing more than half of school – has more than doubled from 0.8% to 2%“.

Are attendance certificates helping or hindering? Recent research from Harvard raises questions about their effectiveness. The research raises the point that they can be demotivating – especially after the reward has been given.

“Survey experiments probing the mechanisms suggest that awards may cause these unintended effects by inadvertently signaling that the target behavior (perfect attendance) is neither the social norm nor institutionally expected. In addition, receiving the retrospective award suggests to recipients that they have already outperformed the norm and what was expected of them, hence licensing them to miss school.”

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts england@teachertapp.co.uk.

The worst bit of this news is that the most significant trend is among deputy and assistant headteachers, i.e. the group from whom the next generation of headteachers will be drawn: just 37% of these senior leaders now express an aspiration to headship, down from 55% in 2017.

If nothing changes and this trend continues, schools will face even greater difficulty filling headteacher posts. What puts people off? And are schools doing enough to develop assistant and deputy heads to prepare them for headship? Let us know your thoughts by commenting below.

Read more on our blog.

Do teachers have a say in which subjects they lead?

There has been a drop in the number of primary teachers who have a say in what subjects they lead 51% in 2026 DOWN from 59% in 2022.

Of that number, 44% are happy about the choice of subjects they lead on, and 7% are unhappy.

How much teaching experience do subject leaders have?

Primary teachers often become subject leads very quickly:

• 23% before the end of NQT/ECT year

• 49% within a year of NQT/ECT

• 28% at a later date.

Are teachers paid for subject leadership?

Being paid a TLR for subject leadership responsibility is relatively uncommon: just 18% report being paid a full TLR, 6% a partial TLR and a massive 77% have no TLR at all.

Compared to previous years, TLR payments for subject leadership in primary are on the decline: in 2022, 23% were paid a full TLR, compared to 18% today. Not only that, but teachers with less than 5 years of experience are the least likely to report receiving TLRs: just 7% are paid TLRs for subject leadership, compared to 27% among teachers with over 5 years of experience.

Read more about our findings in this week’s blog.