Questions from the Department for Education:
Workforce: recruitment and retention
What factors influence labour market choices and how do they vary for different groups, parts of the workforce, including at a sub-national level? This includes the role of non-pay factors such as workload, wellbeing and flexible working and their relative importance .
Department for Education, 2025
Workforce: specialist and support
How and when are our specialist and support workforces (such as Specialist Educational Needs Coordinators, Educational Psychologists, and finance professionals) deployed? How does this vary and why (for example across regions, for different specialist workers such as children’s home staff), and between the state and independent school sectors)?
Department for Education, 2025
Workforce: recruitment and retention
What are the most cost-effective ways to recruit and retain our workforces? How does this vary across the education and children’s social care workforces (including relevant local authority staff such as educational psychologists), and at all stages of their careers (including recruitment into initial teacher training courses and late career recruitment)?
Department for Education, 2025
Family security: Family support
How can we mitigate the factors that put stress on families and enable them to have suitable housing and good quality home environments?
• How much information and understanding do education providers across our sectors have about students’ home circumstances, and what adjustments do they make?
Department for Education, 2025
Family security: Keeping children safe
How can we ensure that multi-agency responses are coordinated effectively to reduce, and ideally prevent, young people’s exposure to and experience of harm?
• How do we ensure that front line staff have access to all the relevant information from across systems and agencies, to ensure effective decision making in provision of support?
Department for Education, 2025
Family security: Keeping children safe
Where children cannot live with their birth parents, how do we support and enable others (including wider family networks) to provide good quality care which leads to better life outcomes?
• How does this vary for different family types, including both formal and informal kinship carers, foster carers, and children who leave care under an adoption order or special guardianship order?
Department for Education, 2025
Skills for opportunity and growth: Wider benefits
• Are the benefits of FE and HE shared equally or do some groups benefit more than others?
• Do these benefits vary by the type of HE or FE study e.g. full degree or short courses, institution (university or FE college) or mode of study?
Department for Education, 2025
Skills for opportunity and growth: Wider benefits
What are the wider non-salary benefits of HE and FE for individuals, communities and society?
• What are the benefits of HE and FE on individual wellbeing, physical and mental health, societal engagement, and long-term employment?
• What are the wider societal benefits of HE and FE study and provision (including the local and national benefits generated by HE/FE providers)?
Department for Education, 2025