Do you think you’re more likely to complete pgce if you have the higher bursary?

[Daffodillia]

Say in Maths, with the £28k bursary. You’ll be on a more money than when you qualify!
Do you think this high financial incentive is more likely to keep people pushing through the year compared to say English which had a £6k bursary?

Perhaps. But I don't think it leads to more people starting the nqt year...

DD1 will be completing her history PGCE in a couple of months with a £4K bursary. She will be expected to teach a range of humanities subjects - including geography. The geography PGCE comes with a £26k bursary

I spoke to someone earlier this year that turned down a place on a physics PGCE as the bursary was higher than his starting salary so he felt that there was no incentive to qualify.

They have been offering higher bursaries for Physics for at least the last 21 years (I got £500 back then compared to nothing for history!). We don’t have a surfeit of Physics teachers. Maybe it isn’t problems with training which is the issue.....

I do think these bursaries are divisive : and it does seem short sighted when often new teachers teach multiple subjects (such as the geography example above). What it will also no doubt lead to is higher starting salaries for teachers of shortage subjects, quicker progression up payscale so higher long term earnings and probably also, for the right people, better career progression. I feel sad that my job teaching a vital core subject is valued so low: and I can see that the quality of recruits into my subject is rapidly declining. There is a knock on effect to young people as well : the very brightest students now almost uniformly head to science and maths , and other so called high calibre gold standard A levels such as Eng Lit are seeing a decline . It's all rather saddening. It won't be long before MFL dies out in many schools : they can EBacc it all they like : it is in a terminal decline.

Goodness knows. Even if they passed the pgce year, the incentive to complete the nqt year and remain in teaching would plummet with the pay drop!

The government needs to realise that its the retention of teachers they need to focus on!

Yes I am surprised the the bursary for MFL remains and at such a high level but at the moment there seems to be a lot of vacancies to match though most now ask for 2 or more languages.
How long do you think it will take for subjects like this to no longer be offered in the majority of schools?

Don’t assume, piggy that the subjects with high bursaries are now overburdened with brilliant trainees. I wouldn’t say the quality has noticeably improved, we have a mix of good, passable and poor as we’ve always had. What we now also have are those who are doing it for the bursary with no intention of teaching, and those who are really struggling and need to drop out but who are hanging in there until the next non-refundable payment.

I was discussing with our trainee how as soon as she’s an NQT her pay will not only drop dramatically from the bursary (tax free!) but she will have to start paying council tax and start paying her student loans back. It’s a massive, nonsensical drop, and round my way schools start NQTs on M1.

Yes, true noble. I noticed last week in some training that the maths trainee was the least , shall we say, suitable...

I was discussing with our trainee how as soon as she’s an NQT her pay will not only drop dramatically from the bursary (tax free!) but she will have to start paying council tax and start paying her student loans back.

I hadn’t thought about council tax etc as well. I wonder what the difference in pay is per month between August and September!

I’d never really considered people doing it just for the year with no intention of teaching in the 1st place. Purely doing it just for the grant.

My thinking was that people are more likely to struggle through than drop out, than those on a lower/none existent bursary.

That’s really rubbish woolly

The bursary causes other issues too. I'm nqt and one of the best trainees from our year is not doing her nqt, because she's mfl but not with the language all the schools here do. She couldn't have known this before starting training, as several schools have changed their options this year. If she'd known she could have qualified under her other degree subject, although that would be one with a tiny bursary - which is why she went with the mfl!

You do need a decent bursary though. There's no way I could have afforded to leave a goodish public sector job to retrain without it.

Agree with others, it's not the 'completing of PGCE' that is the issue. Anyone who knows anything about education, teaching, and schools will be able to tell you it is retention that is the issue.

It is ludicrous that the Gvmnt is offering this bribe with no 'condition' of actually having to teach - in state education - for 5 years or so.

Totally agree BackForGood.
Anecdotally, myself and two family members qualified as teachers in the last 5 years. We are all shortage subjects. One got 15k, one got 22k and I got nothing. The 15k completed NQT, got pregnant midway through RQT and has been a SAHM ever since. 22k completed NQT, sacked it in and is now in recruitment. Muggins over here is still at the chalkface. I seriously question the value for money of the burseries!

That doesn't at all surprise me though holiday as I am assuming you were the one who wasn't financially motivated :and, therefore, the one who was making the choice to go into teaching perhaps more vocationally/ altruistically?

The whole bursray has changed the nature and expectation of teacher training ,too : as a recent thread evidenced and aawful lot of commitment , professionalism , maturity , and capability is now expected of trainees, and a high workload (as high or even higher than ours) whereas, back in the stone ages (when , yes, there was £500 for mathematicians!) we were viewed first and foremost as students, led student lifestyles (there were very few mature entrants) and were expected to be on learning curve rather than dive right in. It was after this proper university based PGCE model (still exists in Finland...) ground to a halt that the crisis began...

While I understand the problems with the 'no strings attached' thing, I would never have risked changing careers without the bursary. Mine was more than I got paid in my first few years of actual teaching but I also had £9k of fees to pay which took it down to way less than that in real terms.

I don't know anyone who has been fast tracked up the pay scale simply for being in a shortage subject, though I can see the reasoning the slt might want to retain a good physics/maths teacher. In my previous school not one single maths or science teacher got promoted as slt seemed to use "is there flexibility in the timetable to cover the classes this teacher will drop" as part of their selection criteria another reason I'm glad I quit.

WRT the salary drop, I do think a lot of people aim to save a decent chunk of their bursary to either pay back their fees or for the future (e.g. house deposits) which helps soften the blow of the pay cut. That said, with a 26k bursary, it would be several years before you had a similar amount of take home pay.

I do think it helps a lot for career changers, but of course there's no incentive to stay in teaching (let alone to stay in the UK state sector once you qualify). I really think the bursary should have conditions attached and/or there should be some kind of retention bonus.

DD is getting the Maths scholarship for his PGCE this year, so £27K tax free. She has also taken the student loan. She has basically saved most of the money as she is fully aware that she has not chosen a highly paid career and feels this is a cushion. However I think she would have gone into teaching without the money.
She tells me that others on the course who have discovered they are not cut out for teaching are struggling on because of their bursaries.
Incidentally she won't start repaying his student loan in the NQT year and won't ever repay it all because the threshold for repayment now starts at £25K.

I think English has a £15,000 bursary? I hope so anyway as I'm starting in September!

Sorry it is £15k egg

When my DH did his PGCE 15 years ago he had a bursary of £9000 plus a loan of (I think) £1000. With no council tax to pay he could afford to train. He then was able to get his loan paid back for staying in the state sector once qualified. Paying loans whilst committing to teaching seems a far better system to me than a whacking great handout with no requirement to benefit the state who gave you that cash.

DH has taught long enough that his loans were written off so he’s served his time (not that he’d do anything else). It makes me cross that trainees can take £30k, never set foot in a classroom afterwards (or only ever teach in the private sector) and have no requirement to pay that money back.

Paying loans whilst committing to teaching seems a far better system to me Indeed that exact thing was in the Conservative manifesto last year. All new teachers to get student loan paid in the first five years and ultimately written off. It was quietly dumped after they "won" the election and replaced with a scheme to repay a very few loans in a very few hard to recruit schools.
Don't forget the trainees now have to pay tuition fees of £9000.

Repaying student loans was offered to teachers when I trained, but back in those days tuition fees were very low so it wouldn’t cost too much (and there were no fees for a PGCE!). Nowadays trainees have debts of up to £50k so that would be much more of a commitment from the DfE.

Most student loans will never be fully paid off so the government wouldn’t really be losing out on much - you’d have to be teaching a fair few years AND have a payscale to move up in order to reach repayment thresholds so deferring payment further might act as an incentive to stick with teaching. At least we’d get something back through actually having a teacher working in a state school rather than nothing plus -£30000 from the tax pot.

I had no idea that there was no stipulation to at least complete your NQT year with the bursaries! Good grief...

I was on one the higher bursaries I left after 2 1/2 months if Id been paid 100K I would have continued with the training my greatest regret was sticking it out 2 12 months. But of the few who remain on the course, now ever 60% have dropped out I do know a couple are hanging in there because of the large bursary or have hung on so long waiting for the two big payments in February before dropping out.
Of those who dropped out 90% were on bursaries of 25K one was on 30K.
The training is appalling badly organised and there is no support or help, the solution to retaining trainees is to look at the expectations and the support and help they receive.