Bursary funding for trainee English teachers has been cut in half for next year, the Department for Education confirmed today.

Postgraduate students training to teach English in 2025-26 and entitled to support under the student finance criteria will now only get £5,000 in government bursary funding compared with the £10,000 received by trainees who started during the current 2024-25 academic year.

Last year, the government missed its target for recruiting English secondary teacher trainees by over a quarter (26 per cent), with just 2,254 recruited of the 3,035 it aimed to attract into the profession.

However, it looks like the government is now much closer to hitting its target, according to the latest DfE data, with 2,110 trainees recruited so far this year against a target of 2,290.

Meanwhile, the DfE also confirmed in initial teacher training funding allocations published this afternoon that trainee languages and physics teachers do not need to be eligible for financial support to get government funding for bursaries or scholarships for the second year running.

The move comes after experts warned of teacher shortages in subjects including languages and physics, with schools being forced to use non-specialist teachers as a result.

Recruitment: DfE ‘may look beyond bursaries’

Bursaries and scholarships are available to graduate trainees on tuition fee-based teacher training courses in England that award qualified teacher status (QTS).

Jack Worth, school workforce lead for the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), said that “such modest changes” in training bursaries could suggest that the government will be choosing to “emphasise other policy levers for delivering its pledge to recruit 6,500 additional teachers”.

Mr Worth said that the NFER’s evidence suggests that while bursaries generally offer “very good value for money” for improving teacher supply, “other policy options, such as targeted financial incentives, may be better interventions for improving the retention of teachers in shortage subjects”.

The DfE has also announced the other subjects that will receive financial support in the upcoming academic year.

While there has been a slight rise in bursary funding, the figures remain broadly similar to 2024-25.

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For 2025-26, the government is offering the following bursaries:

• £29,000 for chemistry, computing, maths and physics.
• £26,000 for biology, design and technology, geography and languages (including ancient languages).
• £10,000 for art and design, music and religious education (RE).
• £5,000 for English.

This represents a rise of £1,000 for trainees starting chemistry, computing, design and technology, maths, biology, geography and languages courses next year compared to current students who started last month.

The bursary funding for art and design, music and RE has stayed the same.

Grants provided to school-direct training providers to contribute to student salaries and course costs have been set at the same levels.

Scholarship funding has also increased by £1,000 for chemistry, computing, maths and physics ITT courses, standing at £31,000. It has increased by the same amount for French, German and Spanish, so it will now be £28,000 for languages trainees starting courses next year.