Following a conversation on Twitter I started to dig around in data from the DfE looking at both initial teacher training bursaries and also the percentage of trainees who end up with qualified teacher status and a teaching position within a state school in England. The results are curious, and may suggest several issues with the bursary system as it stands. Firstly the data. The DfE have produced data showing the percentage of trainees in a year who subsequently take up a post in a state school, this data runs from 2017/2018 through to 2021/22. Over these five years value of initial teacher training bursaries has fluctuated for different subjects and also for different degree classifications, initially each degree classification received different bursaries though latterly bursaries of the same value within an individual subject were given to any entrant with a 2:2 or better. As a consequence I have used the "2:1" bursary value or the blanket value, and averaged this over the five year data window. I have also averaged out the employment rate over the five year period. This was done by simply averaging the annual percentages rather than summing numbers over five years and averaging (I have tested this and the differences are minimal).
So what do the data look like? Here are my findings using data accessible to anyone at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-teacher-training .
Firstly I recognise that my choice of vertical axis exaggerates the differences between subjects, and that the lowest (on the graph) is Computing at 69% and the highest is D&T at 83%. I have omitted Classics; it would have appeared with an average bursary of £22.6k and an employment rate of only 43%, however this only applied to 314 entrants, whereas the smallest of those shown in Business Studies with just under 1200 entrants.
Correlation does not imply causation and so I don't think you should immediately conclude that a sweet spot for retaining teachers is the award of a £10k bursary. It is interesting however that the tuition fees and the average bursary for D&T and English are similar.
So is this down to pay? Maybe, maybe not. When it comes to pay I would suspect that most graduates will be well aware of the may they will receive in teaching and so I would be surprised if the penny only drops half way through their training year. What might happen though is that those receiving the highest bursaries will probably find themselves worse off in their first few years of teaching having received a tax free bursary (and in the the case of Physics, Chemistry, Computing, MFL, Maths and sometimes Geography a potential £2k enhancement through a Scholarship).
As an interesting aside it is worth reading Sam Sims' blog from 2018 regarding pay within and without the teaching profession: https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/teacher-retention-pay-workload/ which indicates that the median pay differential for physics graduates (between employment outside of teaching and in teaching) is of the order of -£6k.
We don't know where these teachers go, whether after a year of ITT they go off and do other jobs or whether they work in the independent sector, but whatever is happening getting on for a third of computing and physics trainees don't end up in the classrooms of state schools.
So is the bursary a sensible way of recruiting trainees? Are there more sensible ways of incentivising teaching as a career, that reward longevity and not simply look to generate headline figures? I suspect so, and I'm sure we all have opinions on this.
To finish, anecdotally, I have heard of several trainees seeing ITT as a "gap year", an opportunity to think about their long term careers, receive a decent bursary, and acquire some excellent transferable skills at the same time. Who knows?!
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