A prank show that aims to attract professionals into FE teaching jobs has been released on social media channels after being commissioned via Channel 4.
Three 10-minute episodes of Undercover Education have been released in the last month, featuring a bricklayer, a mechanic and a chef who give a lesson to an FE teacher posing as an adult seeking a career change.
Sitting in another room, former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq watches and tells the FE teacher to play pranks that test the professionals’ patience and teaching skills.
After the prank is revealed, each episode concludes with the professional reflecting on whether they would take a job in FE.
Channel 4 said the “uplifting” series aimed to highlight the professionals’ “patience, creativity and value of their existing, real-world industry experience”.
Prank your skills
It is part of the Department for Education’s Teach in Further Education campaign that has run since 2022.
Previous videos included Share Your Skills last year – which featured Sky Sports News-style ads with presenter Mike Wedderburn talking to brickies who became FE lecturers.
The Labour government has pledged to recruit an additional 6,500 teachers for schools and further education colleges by spring 2029 at the latest.
However, a National Audit Office report this week found the DfE estimated between 8,400 and 12,400 FE teachers were needed by 2028/29 to meet a rising demographic of young people and to deliver T Levels.
The FE sector is the worst affected type of education provider with 5.1 of every 100 teaching roles vacant in general FE colleges.
Modest success so far
Commissioned by the DfE’s workforce and communications teams since 2022, an FE Week freedom of information (FOI) request last year showed the media recruitment campaign cost £2 million in its first year, £4.1 million in 2022-23, and increased again to £5.1 million for both 2023-24 and 2024-25.
FE Week asked the DfE how much it had budgeted this year, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
In response to the FOI request, the DfE shared data that suggested its campaigns had proved a modest success.
Attitudinal research of the campaign’s target audience – adults between 35 and 65 years old with two years’ experience in priority sectors such as engineering, manufacturing or construction – suggests the proportion of people considering a job in FE rose slightly from 21 percent in 2021-22 to 25 per cent in 2023-24.
However, the target audience’s understanding of FE teaching only rose by 1 percentage point to 24 per cent over that period.
The Teach in Further Education website’s visitor sessions more than tripled from 134,000 in 2021-22 to 457,000 in 2023-24.
In the first two years, unique page views hovered around 500,000 annually, while visits to the website’s job boards section shot up from 32,000 in 2021-22 to 190,000 in 2022-23, before dropping to 124,000 in 2023-24.
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