“I drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago,” explains education secretary Gillian Keegan.
She’s talking about apprenticeships. She often talks in public of her experience on an apprenticeship scheme with a subsidiary of General Motors in the 1980s, which kickstarted a 30-year career in manufacturing, banking and IT before she entered politics.
So it’s no surprise she’s putting her faith in apprenticeships as a way to turn around the dire statistics on teacher recruitment.
Speaking to Tes as she unveils the Department for Education’s new Teacher Degree Apprenticeship (TDA), she says she expects this route into teaching to broaden the appeal of the profession, rather than cannibalise existing routes (you can read our news story on the announcement here).
“What an apprenticeship does is broaden the pipeline of people who can come into a profession,” she says - a point she inadvertently reiterates in another part of the interview when she notes, “I’m the only degree apprentice in the House of Commons”.
New apprenticeship to help teacher recruitment
She argues that, until now, teaching has ignored this option, even though many other highly skilled sectors have embraced apprenticeships.
“If you want to be a space engineer, if you want to be a nuclear scientist, if you want to be a lawyer, if you want to be a medical doctor, you can do it via an apprenticeship, [so] I can’t believe the only occupation that doesn’t need one is teaching,” Keegan says.
The TDA is her attempt to change that and, she argues, it will allow more people to consider teaching as a career option than was previously possible. This includes career changers.
“A very, very important market [for this] is people who want to have a second career...and I think teaching, both in FE colleges and in schools, is a really attractive career for many people who would like to have that shot later in life.”
Keegan says that, at present, people who “already have families and bills, they don’t have the option of going and sitting for three years, not earning money”, but the TDA will make the move into teaching viable.
As well as the TDA appealing to career changers, she says it could also attract people working in schools already, such as teaching assistants who would like to become a qualified teacher.
“We’ve got 59,600 more teaching assistants since 2011, so many of them could potentially want to try this route,” the education secretary says.
Those two pools could, indeed, add new teachers to the profession - but what about those already set on becoming a teacher? Will it just shift them from, say, a postgraduate teacher training course to the TDA, especially if helps them to avoid piling up student debt?
Keegan doesn’t deny this could happen: “In the future, some existing students that go down the full-time route may choose this route…because they want to avoid the student debt, which is something that could be a driver.”
However, she believes the “earn and learn” route will attract a different sort of young person to consider teaching - something she again links to her own apprenticeship experience.
“I grew up in a way that it was important to earn money. When we started work at 16, we used to pay ‘keep’ to our parents to help - that’s an important part of life for some people and there are lots of people in that situation. So that’s another option that people could use to go into teaching.”
The need to boost teacher numbers
Of course, though, it’s not just about convincing people who want to become teachers of the value of apprenticeships - schools and sector organisations will need to buy into the idea that the TDA can deliver high-quality teachers.
On that point, Keegan says the fact that the TDA will be a four-year degree - which she says will be focused on “teaching and pedagogy”, will be linked to a “subject specialism” and will end with trainees receiving a “qualified teaching degree” - should assuage concerns about its merit.
What’s more, she says it has been constructed with input from organisations including the Association of School and College Leaders and “multi-academy trusts and other interested parties”, which means she is confident “it meets what the profession needs”
When it comes to attracting more teachers, that need can’t be met soon enough with recent Department for Education data showing there were 26,955 new entrants to initial teacher training in 2023-24 - a notable decline on 2022-23 (28,463) and 2021-22 (36,159) and the lowest level recorded in nine years.
Furthermore, maths - the subject that will be the focus of the TDA’s pilot of 150 teachers in secondary - achieved just 63 per cent of its trainee recruitment target last year, recruiting 1,852 new teachers from a target of 2,960.
Given that prime minister Rishi Sunak has made studying maths up to age 18 a key education policy focus, it perhaps didn’t hurt Keegan’s chance of getting sign-off for the project to focus it on maths and show that action is being taken to try and increase the number of teachers in the subject.
“We know that maths is vitally important - we’re in a highly digitised world, it’s only going to get more digitised - so those kinds of skills are immediately important,” she says.
“That’s why we want our children to have more maths as a basic up to 18 because we know what kind of jobs they’re going to be competing for and we want to make sure that they have the very best education that can power them to wherever they want to get to in life.”
The small matter of a general election
Of course, though, the first trainees are not slated to start any apprenticeship until next year and there is the small matter of a general election later this year that could see the whole project fall by the wayside if a new government takes power and ditches it.
Reflecting on that possibility, Keegan voices her concern that Labour’s promise to reform the Apprenticeship Levy, which underpins the funding used to cover businesses’ apprenticeship costs, could have a damaging impact on schemes including the fledgling TDA.
“Labour, who I don’t think really understand the apprenticeship system or the power of it, have said they’re going to introduce a policy that will make the levy more flexible, which means basically only half of the money that we spend today will be available to spend on apprenticeships. So the reality is they will halve the number of apprenticeships,” she says.
“So I would imagine that not only might this one [the TDA], if they did win an election, not get off the ground but many of the others people are doing right now all across the country would be not available.”
A Labour source responds to this by pointing out that “the hundreds of millions of pounds handed back to the Treasury each year show the Apprenticeship Levy is not working” and that “businesses back” Labour’s plan to reform the levy.
“Apprenticeships, like teacher numbers, have fallen off a cliff under a succession of Conservative ministers,” they add.
Party politics aside, it seems clear that Keegan recognises the challenges of buy-in to the new plan.
“I could see no reason whatsoever why we couldn’t do a teaching degree apprenticeship...I was convinced, but it took me a while to convince others,” she admits.
The ultimate worth of that fight we will only know in time.
