Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of extending the geographical eligibility of the student loan repayment scheme for teachers.

The ‘Teachers: claim back your student loan repayments’ scheme was announced in 2017 and is targeted at 26 local authorities in England we have identified as having a high need for teachers, as determined by our published data at this time.

We have commissioned an external evaluation of the scheme and expect to publish the final evaluation report this year. Once we receive the final evaluation report, we will consider if eligibility for the scheme should be extended.