Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of the relative effectiveness of the different routes into teacher training.

The Department regularly assesses demand from the sector, how well different Initial Teacher Training (ITT) routes attract trainees and trainee quality by route. Sir Andrew Carter also considered this issue in his independent Review of ITT.

It is too early to carry out a final comparison of the new routes into teaching. We would need data on their trainees’ impact in the classroom, which is not yet available for our new routes. The first full cohort of School Direct trainees have, for example, only been teaching for one term.

The Department has, however, recently initiated a project to link together the School Workforce Census and 2013/14 ITT performance profiles in order to piece together teachers’ professional journeys from ITT into employment and their subsequent progression. In time, with the addition of further data, this will enable us to look at the influence of different ITT routes on teacher employment, mobility, progression and retention.