Why we made this change
To help align with wider department priorities for all teachers to have qualified teacher status (QTS), we worked with ministers to agree on a recommendation to prioritise applicants who are already contributing to the workforce in England and working in valid educational settings.
Helping more overseas trained teachers to access efficient recognition routes supports getting more qualified teachers into the workforce, and retaining them once they've started working in England.
What we changed
We are prioritising assessment for applicants who have worked in a valid role and setting in England for any length of time in the last 12 months. The valid roles and settings include:
- a teacher, supply teacher, cover supervisor or teaching assistant in a state school
- a teacher, tutor or lecturer in an Ofsted registered Further Education and Skills setting (for example, a college)
- a lecturer or tutor in an English Higher Education provider registered with the Office for Students (for example, a university)
- a teacher in an Ofsted registered Early Years setting (for example, a nursery)
- a teacher or a supply teacher in an independent school
To enable this across our service, we have introduced:
- a new question into the initial eligibility question flow to explain the prioritisation criteria and ask applicants if they meet it
- new questions into the application form to capture whether they have valid experience in England that would allow us to prioritise their application, and where relevant, remove the additional subject requirements
- a new part of the assessment process where assessors can review applicants’ work experience in England and confirm if their application should be prioritised, along with new filters to help assessors find relevant applications
- a new referee flow to confirm an applicant’s work experience in England before they are prioritised
- new emails to confirm if applicants will be prioritised or not, and what this means for the next steps of their application
How we approached it
A number of design challenges were considered in effectively implementing this change, including:
- identifying and capturing information from applicants currently working in England
- defining and explaining the roles and settings we would accept
- applying prioritisation logic without disrupting the standard QTS journey
- managing applicants who are not valid for prioritisation
We ran an initial sprint to confirm the team’s understanding of the policy intent, gain alignment on the problems we were trying to solve, identify options for implementation, and analyse the feasibility and potential impact of these.
From here, we worked closely with policy and operations leads to clearly define the criteria for prioritisation. This included workshops to understand the exact roles and settings we would accept, and how assessors would be able to confirm they are valid. We also sent out a survey to existing applicants, to grasp their understanding of educational settings and roles across different countries.
This helped us to shape the terminology we used, for example, clarifying a ‘college’ as an Ofsted registered Further Education and Skills setting, alongside a link to the valid settings, to avoid any misunderstanding between a college and university.
To verify our design thinking for the new assessment flow, we ran a co-design workshop with assessors. This helped us to iterate at speed, and ensure the design aligned with their workflows and expectations. We then developed internal guidance for assessors, to support them in understanding the different prioritisation filters available within the case management system, and to understand how to manage edge cases.
As this was unannounced policy, we were unable to test our designs and journeys with applicant users. Instead, we used methods like surveys, initial research with stakeholders, and co-design workshops with assessors to inform our designs.
What’s next
Since deploying these changes in August 2025, we have completed rounds of user research to confirm our applicants’ understanding of the prioritisation criteria. Alongside data insights, we iterated the design and content to give more clarification on the criteria to be prioritised.
We’re also working with assessors to provide clearer information on response times for applications from teachers with experience in England, helping them meet their service-level agreements (SLAs).
Additionally, we’re monitoring data on applications from teachers with experience in England and exploring ways to raise awareness of this change, so that more teachers that meet the requirements can benefit from getting QTS in England faster.