Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of teacher shortages on the availability of Computer Science A level in schools in the most disadvantaged areas.

Recruiting and retaining more qualified, expert teachers is critical to the government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity and boost the life chances for every young person, including those most disadvantaged.

Whilst it is ultimately for individual schools to decide which courses to offer, the best way of supporting schools to offer A level computer science is to ensure high-quality computing teaching by helping schools to recruit and retain good teachers.

For the 2024/25 and 2025/26 academic years, the department is offering a targeted retention incentive worth up to £6,000 after tax for computing teachers in the first five years of their careers who choose to work in disadvantaged schools. This will support the recruitment and retention of specialist computing teachers in the schools and areas that need them most. In Rusholme Constituency, seven out of a maximum seven schools are eligible for these retention payments. There are also tax-free bursaries worth £29,000 and tax-free scholarships worth £31,000, to encourage talented trainees to teach computing.

In the 2024/25 academic year, there were 496 new postgraduate entrants to computing initial teacher training (ITT), a 21% increase on the number of entrants in the 2023/24 academic year (411). The number of postgraduate entrants in 2024/25 was broadly in line with the average across the last ten years.

As of April 2025, the department is seeing positive recruitment trends regarding postgraduate ITT recruitment in computing. So far, there have been more candidate submissions (+10%), offers (+42%) and acceptances (+47%) compared to the same point in the previous recruitment cycle.