Key findings

Every year we publish a detailed breakdown of the education workforce in Wales. This covers a wide range of practitioners across the seven groups we register. They are:

• teachers and learning support staff in school and further education (FE) settings;
• qualified youth workers and youth support workers; and
• work-based learning (WBL) practitioners.

The statistics we produce come from our Register of Education Practitioners (the Register). The real-time Register provides detailed and comprehensive data on all registered groups.

As at 1 March 2021, there are 78,626 individuals registered with us.

How is our data different?

The data we provide is unique and is not available through any other organisation or body. For that reason, it should not be compared with other sources like the Welsh Government’s school workforce annual census (SWAC).

Our statistics differ in that we report on the whole education workforce in Wales. For the school sector in particular, unlike the SWAC, our data is more comprehensive. This is because it includes all supply teachers, peripatetic workers, freelance workers and others providing education or training in a range of education settings. We also hold significant historic data – in the case of teachers, this is 20 years. This enables us to provide extensive trend information.

We calculate the percentages quoted on ethnicity, national identity and Welsh language from the total number of registrants. This includes those where the value is unknown. The percentage of ‘unknowns’ in each area is noted for completeness.

Note: To establish the Register for each group we worked with employers, the initial en masse registration required minimal data. Practitioners have further populated their records, and continue to do so, with new registrants providing full information. The newer registrant groups are:

• further education teachers (joined in 2015)
• school and further education learning support workers (joined in 2016)
• work-based learning practitioners, youth workers and youth support workers (joined in 2017).