Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to attract people seeking a career change into the teaching profession.

Career changers are an important source of new teachers and who bring relevant knowledge and experience from their previous employment.

In 2016/17, 20% of new entrants to initial teacher training (ITT) courses were aged 30 years or over, an increase of 2 percentage points from 2015/16.

Our marketing campaign, ‘Your Future - Their Future’, uses a range of advertising to promote teaching. As part of this, we will run a month-long ‘New Year New Career’ sub-campaign in January which will be dedicated to attracting more career changers into teaching.

We provide support to potential career changers, including bursaries or scholarships of up to £30,000 tax-free, advice and guidance from expert advisers on the Teaching Line, help with arranging school experience to assist with their ITT application and access to our free Train to Teach events.

We also provide specific support for career changers to make the transition to teaching. This includes:

• The School Direct (salaried) route which is specifically targeted at career changers with three years’ work experience and which allows them to earn a salary whilst they train to teach.
• Courses at 10 School Direct lead schools in mathematics and physics, which began in September 2016. There are two routes available within this pilot:
• An accelerated full-time route to achieving Qualified Teaching Status in 6 months, rather than a year, aimed at those who wish to move quickly into teaching and have the experience and ability to do so; and
• A part-time route up to 2 years for those people who may have family or other commitments that restrict the hours each week they can train and then teach and/or who want to work closer to home.
• Outside of this pilot, there are 5 other flexible ITT courses.