Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to increase the take up of teacher training places in (a) maths and (b) physics: and if she will make a statement.

The Department is investing £181 million in financial incentives to attract high quality graduates into a career in teaching, including tax-free bursaries worth £27,000 and tax-free scholarships worth £29,000, to encourage talented trainees to train in mathematics and physics.

For the 2023/24 academic year, the Department has extended bursary and scholarship eligibility to all non-UK national trainees in physics. This is part of a wider package of new measures to make teaching in England even more attractive to the best teachers and trainee teachers from around the world.

The Department launched a pilot initial teacher training course in spring 2022, called ‘Engineers Teach Physics’, designed to encourage engineering graduates and career changers with an engineering background to consider a career as a physics teacher. This year the Department is expanding the pilot to a national roll out.

From autumn 2022, the Department is offering a Levelling Up Premium worth up to £3,000 tax-free for mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computing teachers in the first five years of their careers who choose to work in disadvantaged schools, including in Education Investment Areas. This will support recruitment and retention of specialist teachers in these subjects and in the schools and areas that need them most.

Information on the state-funded school workforce in England, including the number of teacher vacancies by subject in secondary schools, is published in the annual ‘School Workforce in England’ national statistic, available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.

Figures for November 2022 will be published in June 2023. The latest information from November 2021 shows that there were 232 mathematics and 17 physics teacher vacancies in state-funded schools in England. This can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/bf345e04-0e82-4db4-9ea0-08dabce49219.