Philip Davies – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Philip Davies on 2016-07-21.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what new measures she is implementing to encourage take-up of teacher training.

Nick Gibb

The latest published figures from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service show that teaching remains a hugely popular profession; nearly 28,000 people have been recruited to postgraduate teacher training courses in England in 2016/17, with several weeks of the recruitment cycle remaining.

Our 2017/18 teacher recruitment marketing campaign will commence in the autumn and will feature a new television advert, alongside print, online and social media advertising. Forty recruitment events will take place across the country, and teaching will be promoted also at over thirty graduate fairs where our advisors will meet students, setting out the benefits of a career in teaching.

To support recruitment in 2017/18, we will also be announcing a new package of financial incentives, including bursaries and scholarships to attract top graduates in priority subjects such as physics and maths, in early autumn.

In addition, we are spending up to £67 million on a programme of measures to upskill the existing maths and physics teaching workforce, and increase the number of new maths and physics specialists entering teaching. This package aims to recruit up to 2,500 new teachers and upskill up to 15,000 existing teachers over the term of this parliament.