Black and Asian people twice as likely to choose RE teaching as a career
NATRE reported recently about the people who teach RE and the specific challenges we face in recruitment and retention. The data from the initial teacher training census 2023 – published by DfE December 2023, presented in the graph below shows our findings about the ethnicity of people who choose RE teaching as a career.
The data shows that teaching in general and teaching certain subjects including RE, appears to attract a greater proportion of people from ethnic minority groups than in the working population as a whole. The 2021 census tells us that working-aged people in England and Wales are 10.1% Asian, 4.4% Black, 2.5% Mixed, 2.3 Other and 80.7% White. So Black and Asian people are twice as likely to choose RE teaching as a career as you’d expect given the pattern in the population as a whole.
How can we explain these figures? Might they help the Department of Education to recruit more teachers?