A scrapped government early career retention-payment scheme helped to reduce the number of teachers leaving the profession, new data shows, amid uncertainty about the “levelling-up premium” that was slated to replace it.
The early career payment policy was piloted from 2018 to 2020, and offered new maths and physics teachers in some areas of the country a retention payment of £2,000 each year.
Now a new report from the Gatsby Foundation found that maths and physics teachers paid the yearly retention payment of five per cent were less likely to leave teaching after their first two years in the classroom.
However, the pilot was scrapped for new teachers starting their training courses in the 2021-22 academic year.
At the time, teacher trainers labelled the move “premature”, owing to “no clear evidence of how retention might play out for the current cohorts of teachers”.
But at the Conservative Party conference in October last year, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced the creation of a “levelling up premium”, worth £3,000, to send the “best maths and science teachers” to schools that need them most.
The Gatsby report said 27 of every 100 maths teachers who complete their training and enter the classroom leave within the first two years of teaching. Where these teachers were offered the retention payment, only 22 left the classroom, leading to schools retaining an additional five teachers.
The report suggests that if this pilot policy had been applied to the maths teachers who started teaching in 2016-17, the teacher retention payment could have retained a further 104 teachers into their third year.
Even with an increased number of applications to teacher training as a result of the pandemic, last year, initial teacher training (ITT) physics courses recruited just 22 per cent of the target set by government.
The report said that this, “combined with the fact that science and maths teachers leave the classroom in greater numbers than other teachers, has resulted in a severe shortage of specialist science teachers”.
The reasons teachers leave the classroom are varied, but there is a strong demand for science graduates in other sectors, meaning that maths and physics teachers may have more and better paid options open to them outside of teaching when compared with other subject teachers.
Sam Sims, co-author of the report and lecturer at UCL, said that schools are facing shortages of maths and physics teachers “year after year”.
However, he said the report “shows that targeted pay increases help retain teachers, and ensures that more pupils have access to specialist teachers in these subjects”.
‘Impossible to say’ if levelling up premium will make a difference
Dr Sims added that it was “impossible to say whether a levelling-up premium” will have enough impact, as it is still uncertain how much each teacher will receive and when this payment will be introduced.
He added: “Incentives only incentivise if people know about them.”
He said there are “pretty high shortages”, so even if each teacher were to receive the £3,000, it would be “unlikely that they’re overcooking it”.
And Jenni French, programme director at Gatsby, said it was “encouraging” that salary premiums had an effect on the retention of teachers.
“However, we urge that as part of the evaluation of the levelling-up premium, consideration is given to making greater use of data to track the long-term impact of the premium alongside other teacher retention measures, such as the Early Years Career Framework.”
The evaluation and final report controlled for factors such as the pandemic, subject taught, geographical area and other financial incentives operating at the same time.
