Worcestershire National Education Union branch welcome government's pledge to recruit more teachers
They say it's important work is also done to retain people in the job
A teacher from Worcestershire's National Education Union (NEU) has welcomed the government's pledge to recruit more people into the profession.
Labour have began their push to recruit 6,500 new teachers under new education secretary Bridget Phillipson.
Sean McCauley is one of the branch secretaries from the NEU in Worcestershire who welcomes the plans, but says it's important to also focus on retaining members of staff who are currently in the role.
"That pledge to recruit 6,500 new teachers will go some way to addressing the teacher shortage problem, there's no doubt about that," he said.
"We've already welcomed that nationally as a union, however, the reality of the situation is we've got children who are in classes of over 30, and that doesn't deliver the right kind of education for the children.
"It doesn't do any good for our members who are overloaded in terms of their workload, so we estimate that actually what is needed is a recruitment drive to recruit 33,000 teachers to address that.
"You can recruit the teachers, it's keeping them in the profession which is also a problem, because of workload or issues over pay, a good portion of teachers we have recruited leave the profession, so we also need to be keeping them."
The University of Worcester also announced they have created a 100 additional places for people to train to become teachers.