Imagine you are the Government and you have an unprecedented teacher recruitment crisis, with the numbers signed up for this academic year almost 50 per cent down on your own targets. What do you do?
In the parallel universe that is the last days of Rishi Sunak’s shambolic fiddling while Rome burns, you axe funding to Now Teach, the body set up to help older people transition to teaching as a second career. This, despite it being on course to hit its targets this year. “Beggars belief” is an understatement.
This latest Department for Education (DfE) cost-cutting measure comes at a time when record numbers of teachers – 40,000 in the year to 2022 – are quitting the profession due to damagingly inadequate funding, the longest working hours in Europe and paltry pay compared to professional alternatives. This pincer movement forces schools across the country to fill classrooms with teaching assistants and supply teachers to teach 30 pupils at a time, sometimes more.
As regular readers may know, I am one of those career changers, having swapped the relative comfort of the editor’s chair for the initial terror of becoming a teacher of English. The inspiration for that journey came when I heard the co-founder of Now Teach, the former Financial Times journalist, Lucy Kellaway, speak. If she could do it, why not me? The pandemic was the catalyst I needed to follow up on the seed Kellaway had planted. So, I got in touch with Now Teach.
Although, in the unbridled chaos of Covid-19 and locked-down schools, Now Teach did not find me my first school, it gave me invaluable impetus for my tentative journey. Hearing former partners at “Big Six” law firms talking about not only the obvious daunting challenge of the classroom, but also an intimidating staffroom where everyone is half your age, helped me see that anything was possible and that I was truly not alone.
Even since 2022, Now Teach has recruited 409 teachers. It is on track to meet its DfE target of 200 for this September and has hit 107 per cent of its targets since 2019. Now, because of a decision called “myopic” and “extraordinary” by educationalists, its final cohort will begin courses this autumn and be supported for two years until the end of Now Teach’s contract.
The Government funds £7,000 of the £8,500 investment over the course of training – the rest comes from philanthropists. By contrast with the wider recruitment picture, this year, 6,053 candidates aged 40-plus have applied to an initial teacher training course – 38 per cent up on last year. What’s more, we resilient “oldies” are more likely to endure.
There are alternatives to this decision: one would be to invest more in schemes like Now Teach, on marketing and increasing teacher pay to make it more competitive. The other? In the dishonourable tradition of governments throughout history, if you’re not meeting your targets, then slash those targets to make the numbers look less bad.
In figures revealed this weekend, the overall target for secondary school teacher recruitment is reduced by 9 per cent. In physics, which only achieved 17 per cent of its target, that target has been “recalibrated” by 20 per cent. Sometimes, you know, the statistics really do not lie.
Defunding Now Teach really is a misguided decision that fails potential teachers and pupils alike.