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."
