Will Keir Starmer really hire 6,500 more teachers?

Perhaps Keir Starmer’s only solid election pledge is to use the money from VAT on private school fees to ‘hire 6,500 more teachers’ over five years. But how solid is this pledge? And what’s the context?

There are 530,000 teachers, so if the 6,500 were to be hired tomorrow, it would increase the headcount by just 1.3 per cent. Hardly transformational. But the increase is to be spread over five years – which technically can be honoured by 1,300 a year, upping the headcount by just 0.3 per cent a year. This is so small as to be a rounding error. It’s a third of a teacher per school. But Labour isn’t even promising ‘more’ than 530,000 (ie, it’s not promising to take the number to 536,500 in five years). Starmer means more than there would otherwise be.

He can’t mean ‘more than planned’ because there is no five-year target for hiring teachers: there’s nothing beyond a teacher training target for the next year.