Bid to Increase Science Teachers

Ministers promised a new package of incentives yesterday in an attempt to ease the shortage of science teachers in England’s schools.

Schools Minister Lord Adonis said subjects like maths and science would be targeted after the success of the Government’s ‘golden hello’ scheme to attract would-be teachers.

‘At the end of the day, what really matters in schools is having excellent science teaching,’ he said.

‘Books and all that are very important but without the teachers you can’t make anything of them.’ The move – to be detailed tomorrow – comes as author Bill Bryson backed a scheme to send a copy of his book on science to every secondary school in Britain.

Both initiatives aim to boost science education in schools.

Lord Adonis was speaking at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London, where the scheme to send Bryson’s A Short History Of Nearly Everything to 6,000 secondary schools was being launched.

‘We are making a fairly important announcement on further investment in teacher training, building on a lot of the measures we have done to encourage teachers in shortage subjects, particularly maths and science, since 1997,’ Lord Adonis said.

‘We have consistently placed a high premium on recruiting more science teachers – bursaries, golden hellos, more support for the profession.

‘The graduate teacher programme has been targeted at areas of shortage. All these have yielded dividends