If an organisation offered to give you £26K tax-free, with no strings attached, but you then discovered in the small print that the amount in question was considerably lower, you might assume that you were dealing with a sharky accidental claims outfit.

You might be surprised to be told that the offer is, in fact, a cornerstone of a marketing recruitment campaign for a reputable government department: it is the Department for Education’s headline bursary figure that attempts to entice people into teaching. It is only applicable to certain subjects and scales back rapidly to £15K for applicants wanting to teach English, for example.

For many potential applicants this will prove disappointing. And that’s before they’ve even taken into account the many outlays expected from individuals on the route to securing that bursary. Among these are funding transport costs to travel to the “school experiences” that you’re expected to clock up before landing a place on a course. I have paid up to £8 per day to get to some of the schools I have visited in London. Throw in lunch and the costs become significant.

The amount of schools experience required before you start on a formal training course pretty much precludes having a job and a salary.

Lack of support for teacher recruits

Recently I have been gifting around 22 working hours each week to various schools in London by working three days a week over the spring and summer terms. I have been given problem readers to help with guided reading. I have been used as a supplementary teaching assistant to take charge of individual tables around the classroom to keep them on task. I was even left alone in charge of a class temporarily while a supply teacher tried to find out where classroom materials were kept (I’m told this should never have happened). All of it has helped me enormously but, literally, at a price.

For many younger wannabe teachers, the well-known financial provider that goes by the name of “Mum and Dad” will no doubt step in, as parents will fund a house and much else. But a career-changer needs to factor in a period of not working and of investing (we’ll call it that) to get to the change. In other words, they will have to do it from savings, a redundancy, support from a partner or some other means.

It is similar in nursing, where similar pressures are leading to calls for a minimum living wage for all student nurses. They are required to make up 2,300 hospital hours to join the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s (NMC) register. Many are apparently working outside of these placement hours to bring in money to support themselves while achieving their target. The NMC says that those working placement hours are “supernumerary....they perform limited clinical duties...but they are not contracted to provide nursing care”. I think we can all work out how that actually pans out on the ward floor.

But there is hope for nursing. There are now plans to train future cohorts of nurses through the apprentice route as “nursing associates”, who will be paid throughout the process.

The contrast with education is startling. There are no professional teaching bodies that are arguing for big-picture reforms in this area. Therefore, there is no impetus to reform it. There are no standards in this important pre-training phase; it is down to individual schools whether they want volunteers in and how they manage them. The result is people like me drifting around the system wondering what is an appropriate amount and quality of experience.

Education secretary Damian Hinds said at the NAHT conference in May that he would be taking an “unflinching” look at barriers to entry as well as retention. He then devoted the rest of the speech to the retention elements. Understandably so, since the body he was addressing represents qualified staff, as do the other unions and bodies. I can’t find any announcements on teacher training this year from schools minister Nick Gibb, whose remit this is, apart from a grant of £350K to Now Teach in January.

What is needed is a radical rethink of how the whole process of attracting teachers works if an already appreciable recruitment crisis is not to get a whole lot worse.

David Hall is applying to become a teacher. For 25 years, he worked in communications for a range of clients. He tweets @campdavid