Nicholas Dakin
Main Page: Nicholas Dakin (Labour - Scunthorpe)Department Debates - View all Nicholas Dakin's debates with the Department for Education
(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Elizabeth Truss
I agree with my hon. Friend. I am not proposing an entry requirement for Parliament, but perhaps that is something he might put forward. We have new maths and English skills tests for primary school teachers. We are also giving bursaries to maths teachers for primary school. One of the things we have been looking at in Shanghai is having specialist maths teachers in primary schools, which is an interesting model.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
Are the Government meeting their targets for recruiting teachers into maths?
Elizabeth Truss
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. I think that we are at about 90% of our target for this year. It is vital that we get more people into maths teaching, so we have removed the cap on maths teacher recruitment and we are awarding the highest level of scholarships and bursaries to maths. Importantly, we also need more people doing maths at A-level, and we now have record numbers under this Government. We also have record numbers doing further maths at A-level and doing maths degrees. That will increase the supply of maths teachers in future.