In the last year, 11 teachers under the age of 45 have left their jobs amid concerns for ‘good career opportunities’ in the island.

In a House of Keys sitting on Tuesday, Education Minister Julie Edge said that as a result of the pandemic, many people were choosing to go down different career paths.

She said: ‘Training is a key priority for me to make sure we are giving good career opportunities to all our teachers.’

Of the 11, nine were teaching in secondary schools and three in primary schools.

She added that many are travelling off island, with four teachers leaving at Easter - three of which had been teaching in secondary schools.

‘It’s still early in the year so those numbers may continue to fluctuate’, Ms Edge said.

Ms Edge was answering Arbory, Castletown and Malew MHK Jason Moorhouse’s question about the age profile of teachers in the island.

He said an ‘abnormal number of younger teachers’, particularly under 45 years old, were leaving their jobs which is a major loss of ‘future managers’.

The education minister explained that eight teaching posts are currently being advertised and a secondary teaching recruitment working group will ‘review and improve’ the recruitment of secondary school teachers particularly.

Ms Edge added that there are ‘ongoing negotiations’ with regards to teachers’ pay and acknowledged that the pay ‘is quite low when you start in teaching’.

Meanwhile, Mr Moorhouse also asked in the sitting how many supply teachers were on the department’s register on March 1, 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Ms Edge said for 2020 there were 441 supply teachers, in 2021 there were 479 and in 2022 it had jumped to 536.

The figure in 2022 followed a call for any retired teachers to join the register.

The education minister added that anyone on the register who had been inactive (had not gone into a school to teach) in 12 months was automatically removed from the list.

Ms Edge said she felt it was important to ‘keep dialogue open’ and that it shouldn’t be the case to ‘just make someone inactive and not have conversations with them and tell them why’.

‘We will be reviewing the process,’ she said.