Commenting on the initial teacher training statistics released today, James Zuccollo, Director for School Workforce at the Education Policy Institute said:
“Today’s initial teacher training statistics show that the Department for Education’s push to attract more young people to teach in STEM subjects has begun to bear fruit. Recruitment of physics teachers improved by 46%, and STEM recruitment overall increased by 26%.
The combination of improved early career pay and bursaries in shortage subjects has clearly had an impact, although there remains a long way to go to meet the government’s targets. This reinforces the need for financial incentives to continue and for teachers’ pay to improve, particularly in shortage subjects, to ensure that the profession remains competitive with other graduate career routes.
Despite the improvements, shortage subjects remain a long way from their targets and it is unlikely that enough graduates in subjects like physics, music, and computing will ever be recruited to ITT to fill the gaps.
Retention fell again last year, and new graduates are not an effective substitute for experienced teachers. That makes it even more critical for the government to focus on teacher pay and conditions to maintain a high-quality teaching workforce with sufficient experience and expertise to deliver outstanding education for all children.”
