Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to improve the recruitment and retention of teachers.

The Department is investing £181 million in financial incentives. This includes tax free bursaries worth £27,000 and tax free scholarships worth £29,000, to encourage talented trainees to train in key subjects such as chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics. The Department is also offering a £25,000 tax free bursary for geography and languages, a £20,000 tax free bursary for biology and design & technology and a £15,000 tax free bursary for English.

For the 2023/24 academic year, the Department has extended bursary and scholarship eligibility to all non-UK national trainees in physics and languages. This is part of a wider package of new measures to make teaching in England even more attractive to the best teachers and trainee teachers from around the world. This also includes a relocation premium to help those moving to England with the costs of visas and other expenses.

The Department remains on track to deliver £30,000 starting salaries to attract and retain the best teachers. Additionally, the Department has announced a tax free Levelling Up Premium worth up to £3,000 for maths, physics, chemistry, and computing teachers in the first five years of their careers, who choose to work in disadvantaged schools, including in Education Investment Areas.

To support retention in the crucial first few years of teaching, the Department has rolled out the Early Career Framework nationally. This provides solid foundations for a career in teaching, backed by over £130 million a year in funding, and a new and updated suite of fully funded National Professional Qualifications to support teachers and school leaders at all levels to continuously develop their expertise.

The Department has published a range of resources to help address teacher workload and wellbeing, working with the profession to understand and address longstanding issues around marking, planning and data management. The school workload reduction toolkit has been developed alongside school leaders and is a helpful resource for schools that can enable them to reduce workload. This is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit.

Additionally, the Department has worked in partnership with the education sector and mental health experts to develop the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter, which schools are encouraged to sign up to.