Imagine you are the Government and you have an unprecedented teacher recruitment crisis, with the numbers signed up for this academic year almost 50 per cent down on your own targets. What do you do?
In the parallel universe that is the last days of Rishi Sunak’s shambolic fiddling while Rome burns, you axe funding to Now Teach, the body set up to help older people transition to teaching as a second career. This, despite it being on course to hit its targets this year. “Beggars belief” is an understatement.
This latest Department for Education (DfE) cost-cutting measure comes at a time when record numbers of teachers – 40,000 in the year to 2022 – are quitting the profession due to damagingly inadequate funding, the longest working hours in Europe and paltry pay compared to........