The £20,000 hook to entice career-changers in Scotland to train to teach science, technology, engineering and science subjects has been extended to include home economics.
Health and wellbeing is one of the central planks of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, along with literacy and numeracy. Despite this, official figures show that there were only 786 home economics teachers working in secondary in schools in 2017, compared with 990 in 2007.
Teachers discussing the staff shortage in Scotland on the Tes online community forums in January said that home economics was one of the subjects “disappearing” from school timetables, after multiple job adverts yielded no results.
Q&A: Do bursaries work - what can we learn from England’s experience?
Short read: £500k spent on promoting teaching as a career
Long read: The subjects suffering the worst recruitment problems
As part of a drive to tackle the shortage of teachers in the subject, as of today, career changers will be able to apply for a £20,000 Scottish government bursary to support them while training for hard-to-fill teaching roles in home economics and Stem.
Some 100 bursaries are available for postgraduate teacher training courses that get underway in the coming academic year (2019-20) at a total cost of £2 million - with home economics included for the first time. Other subjects included are physics, chemistry, maths, technical education and computing science.
Bursaries to tackle teacher shortage
Education secretary John Swinney said the success of the scheme last year demonstrated that the bursaries had made teaching more accessible.
In 2018-19, 107 bursaries of £20,000 were awarded to career changers to become teachers in Stem subjects
However, teaching unions argue that the best way to attract and retain current teachers is to improve pay. Last week 57 per cent of teachers in Scotland’s largest union, the EIS, voted to reject the latest pay offer, bringing the prospect of national strikes one step closer.
Mr Swinney said: “These bursaries will continue to provide financial help, making it easier for enthusiastic career changers to pursue a career in teaching and share their passion and expertise with pupils.
“The inclusion of home economics in the Stem bursary scheme means it will carry on encouraging new teachers in some of the highest demand teaching posts in schools across the country.”
The move to extend the Stem bursary to include home economics comes in the wake of a report published earlier this year that called for cookery lessons to be compulsory in schools. The Scottish Food Commission report warned that many children could not identify common vegetables and did not know where meat, eggs or milk came from.
Skills Development Scotland education programme lead Ken Edwards said: “The support offered by the Stem Bursary gives career changers the security to make the move from existing employment into teaching.
“This will contribute to getting the right skills balance in the teaching workforce and in supporting young people to be engaged and enthused in their Stem learning.”
