ITT bursaries

[Postapocalypticcowgirl]

So, the ITT bursaries for 2023 have been released here: getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/funding-and-support/scholarships-and-bursaries

I'm a bit concerned about the level of some of these bursaries. If you're "earning" £29,000 tax free to train, then assuming you have undergrad student loans and you make pension contributions, you'll take a pretty hefty pay cut in terms of take home pay as an ECT, and you won't be taking home a similar amount until at least M4.

Surely this isn't going to help retain teachers long term? Wouldn't some of this money be better spent on retention payments, or just pay rises? I'm not against some kind of bursary for trainee teachers- I think it's very hard to do on just a student loan, but I'm not sure bursaries of this level really have much of an impact on the long term numbers of e.g. physics teachers.

Some of these subjects have attracted hefty bursaries for years, and yet there are still a lot of schools around me advertising for science and maths teachers for a January start, because they couldn't fill vacancies for September.

The issue is more to do people training because they get to be a student for another year on tax free money with no intention of ever going into teaching. I have seen it happen in my subject and it is totally unreasonable given the amount of effort that goes into mentoring.

I do think they need to incentivise training in the first place, incentivise taking up teaching positions in less than desireable schools, and incentivise being in teaching at the 5 and 10 year point post training. Incentives don’t need to be just a lump sum - paying for Masters degrees or leadership training, increasing basic salary etc. may be more useful than a lump sum people hold out for and then quit. In other words, make it about the teaching and learning. I also think looking at long term in-service days off would be an interesting idea that may help as well. Other options like paying some kind of increment to remain teaching and mentoring trainees rather than having to climb the breast pole would be helpful too.

Breast pole?! Greasy pole!

There’s also the issue that after 12 years in teaching (assuming you go through threshold) that you can’t get a pay rise unless you go into leadership. I’ve seen so many young teachers leave the profession after 3-4 years due after getting a huge bursary.

It’s a joke, we are a teaching school and so i get a steady procession of ITT students in my classroom. As a science teacher I would say at least half of them have no intention of ever teaching, but love the excellent pay for a nice easy ride for a year ( as they aren’t going to teach they are not worried about their attendance or marking etc ) .

To be clear, I'm not against giving people a bit of money to help them train to teach- the PGCE is hard and you can't really work whilst doing it. I agree that things like paying for masters, maybe student loan forgiveness, etc would be good, as well as just giving people lump sums- and yes, obviously increasing the base salary would be good (and ensuring schools aren't putting ridiculous barriers on achieving UPS).

I also agree that there are definitely trainees who take the bursary and have no intention of teaching- and they can breeze through the PGCE quite easily, because they simply don't care. I've had a student teacher in one of my classes who was a bit like this- it was a challenge to even get her to teach, she was very adept at coming up with reasons why she couldn't, or why she wanted to swap classes, and then she wanted to observe for a few weeks first before doing any teaching. My uni mentor would never have stood for that, but hers seemed to let her get away with it!