Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures are in place to ensure that there is an adequate supply of history, geography, and language teachers to meet the forecast demand stemming from the introduction of the English Baccalaureate.

We have more teachers in our schools than ever before and the number of teachers has kept pace with changing numbers of pupils. There are more than 456,000 teachers in schools throughout England – up more than 15,000 since 2010. Teaching continues to be a popular profession with more than 14,000 former teachers coming back to the classroom in the last year.

We recognise that as schools increase their entry rates to English Baccalaureate (EBacc) subjects there will be more demand for specialist teachers, particularly language teachers. That is why we are spending over £1.3 billion up to 2020 to attract new teachers into the profession including continuing to offer teacher training bursaries in history, geography and languages to make sure that we continue to attract the brightest graduates. We have recently announced the expansion of the teacher subject specialism training to include modern foreign languages.

This investment in training the next generation of teachers clearly demonstrates the political will we have to make sure that all schools are able to recruit the teachers they need.