Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether they have any plans to bring back a student loan forgiveness scheme for teachers, similar to that trialled between 2002 and 2004, in which 10 per cent of a new teacher’s total student loan was paid off each year that they stayed in the profession.

The Department has piloted two schemes in recent years which were designed to attract and retain teachers by repaying their student loans. The Repayment of Teachers’ Loans (RTL) scheme was trialled in the mid-2000s and an evaluation was completed by University of Durham in 2004. This indicated that RTL influenced 11% of participating teachers’ decisions to stay in teaching.

In 2017, the Department introduced the Teacher Student Loan Reimbursement (TSLR) scheme for science and languages teachers in 26 Local Authorities, which allows these teachers to claim back the student loan repayments they have made. The evaluation by CFE Research was published in January 2023, and found that TSLR exerts some influence on both retaining teachers and the areas where they choose to teach.

Both the RTL and TSLR evaluations found that offering bursaries for trainee teachers exerts the strongest influence on teacher recruitment. This is why the Department is offering increased bursaries worth £27,000 tax-free and scholarships worth £29,000 tax-free, to encourage talented trainees to key subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and computing.