What the data shows
The revised ITT Census for 2025/26 puts secondary postgraduate recruitment at 89% of target: 17,174 trainees against a target of 19,270. Primary, by contrast, recruited 128% of its target.
The headline is the least interesting part. Recruitment is strongly polarised by subject. Physical education recruited more than twice its target. Biology, art and design, history, chemistry, mathematics, geography and English all met or exceeded theirs.
At the other end, business studies reached 30% of target, drama 42%, religious education 63%, music 65% and design and technology 71%. Physics (78%) and computing (81%) remain below target despite carrying the highest training bursaries – £29,000 tax-free for 2026/27.
Reading the targets correctly
A recruitment target is not a count of vacancies. It is DfE's modelled estimate – produced by the Teacher Workforce Model – of how many people need to start training so that enough qualified teachers are available the following year. It accounts for projected pupil numbers, expected leavers and other supply routes such as returners.
So missing a target by 30% does not translate into that many unfilled posts, and hitting one does not mean a subject is solved. Targets also move: physics's estimated postgraduate trainee need for 2026/27 has been revised down to 810, from a 2025/26 target of 1,410.
One line in the published table deserves separate treatment. “Other subjects” shows 14% of target, but it is a residual category carrying a large combined target of 2,520 covering subjects without their own target. Its low percentage reflects how targets are allocated, not a single collapsing subject.
Why recruitment alone doesn't settle it
Recruitment against target is one indicator among several, and the subjects it flags are not always the subjects under most classroom pressure.
Physics is the clearest example. It recruited 78% of target – bad, but not the worst on the list. Yet only 72.2% of physics teaching hours are delivered by a teacher with a relevant post-A-level qualification, against a national average of 86.8% across all subjects. The shortfall has been absorbed into timetables rather than showing up as vacancies.
Modern foreign languages recruited close to target at 94%, but has the lowest specialist teaching share of any published subject at 68.7%.
This is why the Explorer shows recruitment, specialist teaching, vacancies and future need side by side, and deliberately does not combine them into a single shortage score. They measure different things in different years and can point in different directions.
Why this matters
For trainees, the subjects furthest below target are where bursaries are concentrated and where employment prospects are strongest.
For school leaders, the more useful signal is the combination: a subject that recruits adequately but is taught substantially by non-specialists is a curriculum-quality issue rather than a hiring one, and needs a different response.
For anyone tracking this over time, the same subjects cluster at the bottom year after year. That persistence is the finding, more than any single year's percentage.