The government’s Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper set out plans to recruit 6,500 additional teachers, and its response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review emphasised strengthening maths provision and tackling ongoing teacher shortages in physics, including through the Subject Knowledge for Physics Teaching programme.
Long-term recruitment deficits have left many schools reliant on non-specialists, and the shortage of degree-qualified teachers falls hardest on disadvantaged schools. In the most disadvantaged schools outside London, fewer than one in five physics teachers holds a relevant degree – that is, a degree in physics or a closely related subject under the Department for Education’s classification.
The government has two main levers to increase the number of specialist teachers. It can attempt to recruit more new graduates into training by raising the bursary paid to trainees in shortage subjects, or it can retrain teachers already in the profession, extending their subject knowledge so they can teach a shortage subject such as physics.
This report, funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, compares the two routes against a common measure: what each costs to produce one additional year of specialist teaching, or ‘teacher-year’. A teacher who teaches physics for a year provides one teacher-year, and the route that produces more teacher-years per pound spent is the more cost-effective.
Key findings
- Each additional year of specialist physics teaching costs the government about £5,200 through retraining, compared with around £41,000 through increasing the physics bursary by £1000. Even including school-side costs such as cover and teacher time, the retraining figure rises only to around £8,600, still about one-fifth of the bursary route.
- Every STEM subject except computing has lost teaching time from subject-qualified staff since 2010/11. Physics, maths and design and technology have each fallen by nine percentage points or more, and only 55 per cent of physics teaching hours are now delivered by someone with a relevant degree.
- International evidence shows retraining can work at scale. Ireland reduced out-of-field (where teachers are assigned to teach subjects without adequate qualifications, certification or specialisation) maths teaching from 48 per cent in 2009 to 25 per cent in 2018 through a single funded retraining programme.
Recommendations
- The government should fund at least one specialist retraining programme that trains serving teachers to A-level depth in physics. Under most plausible assumptions, such a programme would produce specialist teaching more cheaply than a further bursary increase.
- Any funded programme should track completion rates and link participant records to the School Workforce Census, so that it is possible to measure how many teachers finish the programme, whether they go on to teach the target subject, and whether they later return to their original subject.
- At their current scale, retraining programmes cannot replace graduate recruitment, and neither route alone will close the physics shortage; a lower cost per teacher-year is not a reason to cut bursaries. Expanding retraining also depends on removing barriers to participation – above all the cost of releasing teachers from timetabled lessons, which evidence from current provision identifies as the main constraint on completion.
