Oral Answers to Questions

Nicholas Brown Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

We introduced the golden hello scheme to support the recruitment and retention of well-qualified maths teachers in the publicly funded further education sector who can teach at GCSE level and above. Sixth-form colleges are not included in the scheme, because, along with school sixth forms, they are eligible for the recruitment support and incentives offered by the National College for Teaching and Leadership, which are not available to FE colleges.

[Mr Nicholas Brown Newcastle upon Tyne East) (Lab)]

T4. Some 34% of the newly qualified teachers who entered the state-funded teaching profession in 2000 had left the profession 10 years later. What does the Minister think accounts for that poor retention rate?

[Nicky Morgan]

I am always very unhappy to hear about good, highly qualified teachers who decide that teaching is no longer the profession for them. There are, of course, myriad reasons why people decide to leave any particular profession, but over the last four months I have been going around the country meeting teachers, and it is clear to me that the issues of work load and inspections, and some of the expectations of the Ofsted regime, are affecting teachers. That is why, last week, the Government launched the work load challenge for teachers and published the “mythbuster” with Ofsted.