The decision to axe funding for a recruitment programme aimed at career changers is “extraordinary”, multi-academy trust leaders have warned.
Leaders say the decision by the Department for Education (DfE) to stop funding the career-change programme, delivered by the charity Now Teach, is “myopic” amid a deepening recruitment and retention crisis.
Now Teach has said that, as a result of the cuts, it will have to cease recruitment from September.
Its final cohort will begin their courses in the autumn and be supported for two years until the end of the current contract in 2026.
The scheme has received £4.47 million of DfE funding since 2022, recruiting more than 409 teachers in that time.
Now Teach said it is on track to meet its DfE target of 200 for this September.
The cut comes despite the government missing its target for recruiting secondary teacher trainees by 50 per cent last year.
Leora Cruddas, chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, told Tes that the decision to cut Now Teach’s funding was “extraordinary”.
Ms Cruddas said that while the career changers recruited by the programme are “smaller numbers”, they are more experienced and “more likely to be Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects where we have got our biggest recruitment challenge”.
She said she understood that the DfE was doing its best to find money to fund the teacher pay award from last year, but did not think Now Teach was the right thing to cut.
Hugh Greenway, chief executive of the Elliot Foundation Academies Trust - a 33-school trust with primaries across London, the Midlands and the East - also hit out at the decision.
“Now Teach was an innovative, positive and successful approach to a wicked problem,” Mr Greenway said. “Cutting their funding is wilfully myopic. It will simply make things even more difficult for the next government.”
The latest government figures show that since last October, 6,053 candidates aged over 40 have submitted one or more applications to an initial teacher training course - up by 38 per cent compared with the same period last year, when 4,384 had applied.
Now Teach told Tes that the cost of support over three years per “Now Teacher” is £8,500. Of that figure, the government funds £7,000, with the rest funded by Now Teach itself via philanthropists.
The charity said it had recruited 107 per cent of its DfE contract total since 2019.
Speaking to Tes, Lucy Kellaway, co-founder of Now Teach and an economics teacher, said she believes there will be “quite a large number” of potential career changers who “don’t take the plunge without us”.
Ms Kellaway said the charity would need funding to continue recruiting beyond this September, and that it was fighting “tooth and nail” to secure it.
Some philanthropists had already reached out to the charity directly, she said, adding that Now Teach has received a “very positive response from the Labour party”, describing the reaction as “promising”.
Labour lashed out at the funding cut over the weekend, with the shadow schools minister, Catherine McKinnell, saying it was “hard to believe that the secretary of state...is choosing to end the programme that brings business people into education, when schools are crying out for recruits”.
Ms Kellaway said that Labour is “making it look exceedingly likely that they would fund us”.
However, she added that the Opposition could not make any promises.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that the decision to scrap funding for Now Teach “beggars belief in the midst of a teacher shortage crisis” and urged the DfE to reconsider.
“This is a relatively small amount of money in the context of the DfE budget and axing anything which aids recruitment is a retrograde step,” he added.
Warren Carratt, chief executive of Nexus Multi-Academy Trust, which has 14 special schools and one primary in the North of England, also said that the decision “makes no sense”.
He said it was “clearly yet another example of a government in its twilight, acting to meet its short-term financial needs at significant cost to the medium and long terms”.
However, Rob McDonough, CEO of East Midlands Education Trust, said that the government should focus on “getting the basics right”.
He said that more energy should be spent on making the profession attractive “and then we won’t need” programmes such as Now Teach.
Mr McDonough said that, in his trust, “we can already provide the support that is needed” for career-changers and “the mechanisms are already there”.
The government’s announcement comes after a series of cuts to recruitment programmes in the past month, as well as funding for subject knowledge enhancement courses and international relocation payment.
A DfE spokesperson said: “Career changers make a valuable contribution to the teaching profession and bring a wealth of experience and expertise.”
They added that the department remains “committed to continuing to recruit and support them into initial teacher training, through services such as Get Into Teaching, which offers one-to-one support and advice”.
