Making sense of education in your constituency
The lives of children and young people worldwide are inextricably linked to the amount and quality of education they receive
Education in 2025 faces great challenges. From the early years and SEND to apprenticeships and the teaching workforce, policy decisions on education now will impact the future of our people and of our country. However, the national outlook only paints half the picture. Each constituency in the country will face its own unique challenges and opportunities. NFER can help to provide the data, statistics and understanding of the state of education in your constituency.
The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) is the UK’s leading independent provider of education research. Our mission for the past 75 years has been to improve outcomes for future generations everywhere and to support positive change across education systems. We do this by creating and sharing research evidence and insights on education policy and practice, informing policymakers and other key decision makers, and strengthening practice in the classroom.
Sharing insights with policymakers ensures that politicians can make evidence-based decisions and support education institutions, pupils and teachers in their constituencies. In 2024, NFER produced posters for each of the 543 constituencies in England. This displays data such as Free School Meal (FSM) rates, percentage of pupils with special educational needs (SEN), persistent absence rates, attainment scores, funding per pupil and more. Each dataset compares the constituency to the national average, thereby painting a helpful picture for each MP.
As teacher recruitment and retention challenges continue, earlier this year NFER published its updated teacher recruitment and retention in England data dashboard. This displays data relating to the teaching workforce and can be broken down by parliamentary constituency and local authority, by subject and by school type.
The dashboard provides insights into the state of the teacher workforce in each constituency with a number of different measures including attrition rate, turnover, number of vacancies, expenditure per pupil on supply teaching, proportion of hours taught by teachers with a relevant qualification, and much more. The dashboard is available here.
The breakdown of constituency-level education data complements NFER’s wider portfolio of education research and insights, including on assessment, accountability, skills, social mobility, workforce and more. Some of our recent research reports and articles include the future skills needs in England, AI and ChatGPT in lesson preparation, modelling the 6,500 new teachers pledge, the impact of falling pupil numbers, and many others. NFER’s independent and rigorous research findings and recommendations can help to address some of the challenges that the education sector faces and assist policymakers in understanding the intricacies in their own constituencies.
For more information or to receive your education constituency data poster, please contact Matt at m.bezzant@nfer.ac.uk.
