Hitting recruitment targets set by the government is “not the important thing” for Teach First, its outgoing CEO has said.

In an interview with Tes, Russell Hobby defended the teacher training charity for opting for “quality over quantity” in selecting trainees.

Teach First was given £113 million in the four years to October 2025 by the Department for Education for its high-potential initial teacher training and leadership development programme.

“We recruit as many people as we find that are good, and that’s enough from our point of view,” Mr Hobby said ahead of his move from Teach First, after eight years at the helm, to become CEO of The Kemnal Academies Trust.

He took over the organisation from founder Brett Wigdortz. Handover is “never an easy task”, Mr Hobby reflected.

“One of my first jobs was to clarify the focus of the organisation and be clear about what Teach First brings to the table, which is attracting brilliant people into the system, developing them into leaders and building them into a movement as well,” he said.

There is evidence that Mr Hobby’s approach has worked: in an evaluation of the Teach First programme, GCSE attainment in departments that had recruited a Teach First trainee was significantly higher than in similar departments in comparison schools.

And Teach First teachers were more likely to be in leadership positions early in their careers, analysis by the National Foundation of Educational Research showed in 2023.

However, the recruitment of graduates remains a stubborn challenge.

Teach First ‘has never hit the targets’

In 2022-23, Teach First reached 76 per cent of its recruitment target (compared with 62 per cent for the sector as a whole) - a figure that Mr Hobby called “disappointing” in the charity’s annual report.

But he said it should not be judged on “incredibly ambitious” government targets alone, adding that Teach First has “never hit the targets in its history”.

“Let’s call them a stretch target,” he said. “There are plenty of areas where you set a high goal and you see how far you can get on to that.

“I don’t think hitting the target by itself is the important thing here but the quality of the people that come in.”

Mr Hobby insisted that Teach First has “no problem” filling spaces - it had around 8,000 applications this year alone - but said that applicants had to be “appropriately qualified” and able to “thrive on the intensity of the Teach First programme and in schools serving disadvantaged communities”.

A ‘marmite’ organisation

While he is proud of his work, Mr Hobby said that Teach First is still a “marmite organisation”.

“There are plenty of people who love it and plenty of people who don’t care one way or another,” he said of the organisation, which was set up in 2002 to place high-performing graduates into challenging schools.

“My job is to show that Teach First graduates aren’t interlopers - if you can make teaching in a tough school one of the most prestigious things for a graduate to do, that is good not just for those schools but for the whole profession.”

And he said he was not worried that some Teach First graduates decided not to stay in the profession for the long run.

“I think it’s a brilliant thing that some people go on to do other exciting things,” Mr Hobby said, adding that many of those individuals often stay “connected” to the education system in some way.

“The theory isn’t that everybody should stay in the system, although a lot should. You want to make sure that they teach for long enough, that schools get a good value return, and that they learn enough about the system and stay connected to that mission.”

Bursaries should be released in ‘tranches’

Mr Hobby’s move to take on the top role in a multi-academy trust will give him a unique view of the education sector, having himself been a union leader and a charity chief executive.

So what does he think about the government’s teacher recruitment efforts?

“Positive” overall, he said, but “it’s still the case that those schools who are serving the most disadvantaged communities find it the hardest to get the qualified teachers that they need, and they face higher turnover as well”.

One of the ways the government could improve teacher retention is by changing the bursaries strategy, he suggested.

Currently, bursaries are available to graduate trainees on tuition fee-based teacher training courses in England that award qualified teacher status (QTS).

“In an ideal world, bursaries would be released in tranches: during training, on completion for early career teachers and perhaps after five years’ service. Even better, if the service was in a school with a high percentage of pupil premium students.”

Educational disadvantage is ‘system design’

As he prepares to pass the torch on next week to incoming chief executive James Toop, who was part of the original cohort of Teach First trainees, what has Mr Hobby learned from his time at the charity?

“One of the lessons I’ve learned is that you can only be known for a few things as an organisation. To have the maximum impact, you need to make sure your messages are pretty relentless on the same topics.”

For Mr Hobby, the key message is about educational disadvantage, which he insists is “system design, not destiny”.

“The coalition government started well by introducing pupil premium, but over the years it has just lost its focus. I think politics overtook that as well,” he said.

More funding for schools doing ‘harder job’

While the Labour government’s focus on child poverty is “heartening”, Mr Hobby called for more funding for schools that have a “harder job than others…so they can attract staff, pay them well and keep them”.

He also wants more work to be done to support those children who are in enduring poverty - those he calls “ever-FSM” (free school meals).

“We have tended to do better for those who are on the margins of poverty. However, we have made, generally, little progress for those who are in extreme poverty,” he said.

He suggests targeting those schools that serve areas of “deep, sustained deprivation”.

Ministers ‘aren’t white knights’

Mr Hobby will be faced with some of these hurdles first-hand in his new trust role, which he starts the week of GCSE results day.

“The Kemnal Academies Trust [TKAT] serves exactly the kinds of communities that I’ve been talking about - coastal regions, diverse regions, white working-class pupils,” he said.

Mr Hobby added that, with 45 schools, TKAT has the capacity to innovate - which it may need to, given the current financial climate.

“We cannot, and should not, wait for the government to solve all of our problems,” he said. “We should still lobby them but there aren’t any white knights coming over the hill that will sort these issues for us.

“The education system knows what to do here. It’s just sometimes we are put into our silos and we’re isolated from each other. There is room to be very innovative here.”

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