Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of Stat What steps the Government is taking to ensure funding for the training of new computer science teachers is distributed across the country fairly and proportionately.

The Government will be investing £84 million of new funding over the next five years to support existing computing and computer science teachers. This will include a national, intensive Continuing Professional Development programme of at least 40 hours to ensure that existing computing teachers have the knowledge needed to teach the new computer science GCSE. The programme will be designed for current computing teachers who don’t have a post-A level qualification in computer science and will aim to reach up to 8,000 secondary teachers – enough for there to be at least one in every secondary school.

We are also funding a National Centre for Computing Education, and a national network of support for schools to provide training and resources to primary and secondary schools across the country. Further information on this programme will be published in due course.

To support the recruitment of new computing teachers - the Government is providing incentives to attract the best computer science graduates into the teaching profession, offering bursaries of £26,000 and student loan forgiveness for computer science, as one of the priority subjects.