Teachers to be offered financial incentives to stay

Education Secretary Damian Hinds has revealed that extra financial incentives will be made available to encourage talented teachers to stay in the classroom.

Launching the government’s first-ever integrated strategy to recruit and retain more teachers in schools, Hinds outlined a number of proposals to attract and retain the next generation of inspirational teachers.

The strategy will deliver on the Education Secretary’s commitment to champion the profession and will build on the 30,000 classroom teachers the government aims to recruit each year, support the 450,000 teachers already working in schools in England, and boost outcomes for pupils.

Among the measures to achieve this are a plan to offer extra financial incentives to encourage talented teachers to stay in the classroom, with plans for bursaries to be reformed to include retention-based payments for those who stay in the profession by staggering additional payments throughout the first years of their career.

The Education Secretary also announced plans to simplify the process of applying to become a teacher via a new one-stop application system, further efforts to reduce teachers’ workload and provide new teachers with the foundations for a successful career – by creating the Early Career Framework, the biggest teaching reform in a generation, backed by at least £130 million a year in extra funding when fully rolled out.

Hinds said: “When I took this job a year ago, I made championing teachers my number one priority. Over the past year I have worked with Ofsted and the unions to bear down on workload. I think teachers work too many hours - aggravated by unnecessary tasks like excessive marking and data entry, spending more than half their time on non-teaching tasks.

“But those who choose to become teachers chose to do so to inspire young people, support their development and set them up for a bright future – not stay late in the office filling in a spreadsheet. This ambitious strategy commits to supporting teachers – particularly those at the start of their career – to focus on what actually matters, the pupils in their classrooms. In a competitive graduate labour market we must continue to ensure that teaching is an attractive profession so we can train and retain the next generation of inspirational teachers. Working with teachers, school leaders, trusts and unions, this strategy will help to support teachers to do what they do best – teach.”