Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps the Government is taking to improve the retention rate of teachers in England.

The Department is firmly committed to addressing the issues that teachers say make them consider leaving teaching.

The Department continues to work with the sector to remove practices that create unnecessary workload and to develop a workload reduction toolkit.

The Department published guidance in February 2017 to help schools and employers to encourage, support, and enable flexible working requests.

The Department is piloting a new approach for mathematics trainee teachers to test whether offering a proportion of the bursary as a retention incentive remains as effective in encouraging candidates to train to teach. The teachers’ student loan reimbursement scheme is also a pilot programme aimed at increasing recruitment and retention in areas of greatest need. All eligible teachers will be able to apply for a reimbursement on their student loan payments made in the first 10 years of their careers, and can receive up to £1,350 in payments.