Labour has promised in its manifesto to recruit 6,500 new teachers. As part of a plan to boost education standards, the party intends to pay for these new teachers, in key subjects and hard-to-staff areas, by ending some tax breaks for private schools.

The manifesto states that Labour will recruit the new teachers by adjusting how bursaries – tax-free incentives to encourage graduates into teacher training programmes – are allocated. This is broadly a continuation of existing policy.

Currently, higher-achieving students and those in shortage subjects, such as physics, get higher bursaries. Possible changes could be to offer even higher bursaries for the most in-demand subjects (increasing the current £30,000 cap), and to offer bursaries in subjects such as business studies that are currently ineligible, despite consistently failing to meet recruitment targets.

But there’s a problem. With 43,500 teachers leaving the profession in England last year (one in ten of all qualified teachers), policies focused on early-career teachers risk alienating experienced teachers. After all, it could be argued that the teachers who have remained committed to the profession........

© The Conversation