Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of (a) government and (b) other schemes in recruiting science teachers in secondary schools.

The Department commissioned an evaluation of four targeted interventions to increase the supply of maths and physics teachers and upskill existing teachers, which were delivered for the first time to participants in 2015/16.

The full findings from this research were published at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/maths-and-physics-teacher-supply-package.

Recruitment in Science, technology, engineering, and maths subjects has historically been challenging but in 2016/17 (the last year for which we have data) we had the highest number of trainees in science and maths since 2011/12.

We review our recruitment strategies every year and will continue to evaluate options on how best to incentivise recruitment to the profession. Analysis of past recruitment shows that increasing bursaries in subjects that are difficult to recruit to has a positive influence on recruitment performance.