The Department for Education has announced sharp cuts to teacher-training bursaries in a wide range of subjects for the 2026-27 academic year.
Bursaries for languages and design and technology will fall from £26,000 to £20,000, while those for biology and geography will be cut from £26,000 to £5,000, DfE guidance shows.
Bursaries for English, art and design, music and religious education are being removed entirely, meaning that trainees in these subjects will receive no financial incentive to train from next year, the guidance shows.
Scholarships are also being scaled back for the next academic year, with maths scholarships worth £31,000 being withdrawn altogether. Scholarships for French, German and Spanish are being reduced from £28,000 to £22,000. Chemistry, computing and physics scholarships will remain unchanged at £31,000.
Bursaries and scholarships reduced
The top bursary band for chemistry, computing, maths and physics will stay at £29,000, meaning these are now the only subjects that will continue at current funding levels.
The bursary cuts also apply to the postgraduate teaching apprenticeship route, which the DfE says will match the bursary levels of traditional postgraduate routes for the first time.
No subject is receiving an increase in funding for 2026-27, according to the guidance. In total, eight subject categories are seeing bursary cuts, alongside reductions in two scholarship categories.
The DfE has offered training bursaries to cover some or all of teacher training costs since 1986, for qualifying graduates. For example, those with a first-class degree have been able to access more than £20,000 to train to teach chemistry, maths, physics or computing since 2014-15.
The National Foundation for Educational Research estimated today that “these cuts, on their own, could lead to around 2,400 fewer trainees next year”.
Jack Worth, NFER education workforce lead, added: “While these cuts are obviously bad news for schools, it also disappointing that the department yesterday announced and promoted £31,000 of tax-free training incentives for teachers while making no mention of the bursary cuts evident in the DfE guidance released this morning.”
Secondary recruitment still below target
Despite a rise in teacher training applications, the NFER recently warned that secondary recruitment would still fall 15 per cent below target for the 2025-26 academic year.
Physics, design and technology, music, RE and drama are among those subjects still well below target, according to the NFER’s forecast, while biology and PE are expected to be far above.
In total, nine out of 17 secondary subjects are predicted to fall short of recruitment targets.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson described the financial incentives for 2026-27 as a way of putting “more brilliant teachers” in front of pupils to raise outcomes.
She said: “But there is more to do, and we need talented people with the passion and drive to inspire the next generation - working their magic, making school a place pupils want to be, boosting outcomes and transforming the lives of our young people.”
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, expressed his support for bursaries but said that “it is hard to see how they will turn the tide of this [recruitment] crisis on their own”.
He said longstanding teacher recruitment and retention issues will only be solved with improvements in pay, action to address workload and a reduction in Ofsted pressures.
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