The School Workforce Census is a statutory collection of individual level data on teachers and support staff from local authorities, local authority-maintained schools and academies. The census has been held annually since autumn 2010.
Data collected in the School Workforce Census has replaced and improved upon that formerly collected from local authorities in form 618g and from schools in the Spring School Census.
How does it work?
The census works by allowing schools and local authorities to extract data already held in their management information and HR/payroll systems, and sharing that data with the Department via its secure web-based collection tool, COLLECT.
Advice for local authorities, schools and academies on how they should complete the census is provided in this section of the Department's website. Technical documents to support the development of systems to provide the required data are also provided. These will be useful for software suppliers and others who need to develop appropriate systems.
Why has it been introduced?
With all the information on the school workforce in one data source, the Department is now able to provide policymakers, analysts, local authorities and the public with a clearer, more meaningful set of statistics that provide 'one version of the truth’.
Key data on the school workforce has become more timely, comprehensive and accurate and more complex analyses such as headteacher succession planning, teacher supply and pay bill modelling, demand for teachers, and wastage/turnover rates will be possible. The census data fills important gaps such as age, gender and ethnicities of support staff, ethnicities of headteachers, and numbers of qualified mathematics teachers.
Data submitted by local authorities in previous collections has been published in the Statistical First Releases on school workforce in England. These can be accessed via the official statistics page of this website.
Contact us
Please use the service request form if you would like to change your contact details, request a COLLECT username and password or make any queries about the School Workforce Census.
Please use the feedback request form if you have any comments about the content on this web page, the Data Collection Helpdesk service, the COLLECT system or any other aspect of our data collection service.
