Making funding cuts to subject knowledge enhancement (SKE) courses part-way through a recruitment cycle is “unprecedented” and could lead to further trainee dropouts, university teacher training leaders have warned the education secretary.
A letter sent to Gillian Keegan by James Noble-Rogers, executive director of the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET), seen by Tes, comes after funding for SKE was cut back by the government to cover just five subjects from April.
SKE courses are run before or alongside initial teacher training (ITT) courses to support trainees’ subject knowledge.
As well as writing to the education secretary, UCET has called for the restoration of funding for SKE programmes to cover all secondary shortage subjects in a new manifesto published this week.
The manifesto also repeats a call for the government to fund ITT providers to provide hardship support to trainee teachers in need.
Teacher trainee financial concerns
Tes revealed last year that trainee teachers were being forced to drop out of courses because of financial concerns before government data showed that the number of trainee teachers who dropped out or did not achieve qualified teacher status rose to a five-year high in 2022.
In his letter, Mr Noble-Rogers told Ms Keegan that the timing of the decisions made around the funding of SKE courses is “problematic”.
He said: “Withdrawing financial support from SKE in primary maths, design and technology, English, biology and RE programmes will reduce the number of student teachers recruited to these key subject areas, adding even further to the shortages that schools face.
“There will also be implications for those who are recruited to programmes as they will be less prepared to begin their training and may struggle to remain on course.”
Mr Noble-Rogers also cast doubt on the Department for Education’s suggestion that ITT providers could give more time to providing additional subject knowledge support as part of their training.
He warned that finding time for more subject knowledge “on what are already overcrowded courses of just 10 months duration” will not be an option for many.
“The timing of the announcement is problematic. Making changes like this part-way through a recruitment cycle is unprecedented and will inevitably give rise to questions about the underlying reasons for the decision,” he added.
Mr Noble-Rogers said that prospective teachers will have applied for ITT programmes “on the understanding that SKE support will be available”.
“Giving ITT providers just a couple of weeks, over the Easter holiday period, to make offers conditional on SKE being undertaken is unreasonable.”
The letter to the education secretary comes as fears grow over a spiralling teacher recruitment and retention crisis.
In an email to providers last month, the DfE said that from April 2024 SKE provision would be focused “on the five subjects with the greatest sufficiency challenges (mathematics, physics, chemistry, computing, and modern foreign languages)”.
Hardship fund could help students ‘who need it’
Mr Noble-Rogers told Tes that the funding for hardship grants to student teachers “could be allocated directly to ITT providers to pass onto those students who need it”.
He added that the funding could be organised “pro-rata to all-year student numbers”, and that “unused funds could be returned at the end of the year. Unspent bursary funding might be one source for this”.
The UCET manifesto also recommends the restructuring of ITT bursaries, so that all student teachers receive a standard level of financial support, and fixing bursaries for three-year periods.
UCET calls for ITT providers who lost their accreditation through the controversial market review to be given the opportunity to re-enter the market.
Tes revealed in 2022 that around 25 per cent of teacher training providers could be culled from the market following the conclusion of a controversial government shake-up of the ITT sector.
As part of its manifesto, UCET also calls for the suspension of “the mandatory nature of the existing Quality Requirements, Core Content Framework for ITT, Early Career Framework...pending the development of new approaches”.
UCET said the frameworks - that set out the curriculum for trainee and early years teachers - are currently overly prescripted, which “constrains flexibility, hinders the contextualising of teacher education and places a ceiling on quality”.
A DfE spokesperson said: “We are focusing our SKE funding in priority subjects with the biggest sufficiency challenges including mathematics, physics, chemistry, computing, and languages, alongside trainee bursaries and scholarship for these subjects.”
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