What is the point of bursaries for trainee teachers not on routes into teaching that pay a salary? The assumption must be that an inducement, such as a bursary would help recruit more trainees, or at least keep those that want to be a teacher on their teacher preparation programme.
Each year, the Department for Education decides which subjects will be allocated bursaries. In some subjects, the DfE also works with other bodies, such as subject associations, to offer alternative higher amounts of funding through scholarships. Both bursaries and scholarships have the advantage of being tax free to the recipients.
In the days when the Conservative government championed the Baccalaureate subjects above all others, it was understandable that subjects not included in the Baccalaureate might be regarded of less concern than those that made up the Baccalaureate, and thus that these subjects did not need bursaries, even if an insufficient number of trainees were recruited.
However, for courses operating in 2024/25 and 2025/26, the DfE did pay a bursary of £10,000 to those training to become teachers of music.
The bursary for music was not included within the list of eligible subjects for the courses operating in 2026/27. No reason was provided by the DfE for the removal of the bursary.
However, recruitment targets for music have been missed in six of the last seven years including for the current trainee group (2019/20–2025/26).
The failure to recruit to target has meant fewer music teachers in schools, and a drop in entries to public examinations. Between 2010/11, and the start of the coalition government, and 2022/23, entries for A Level music declined from 8,709 to 4,910. Interestingly, the percentage of A* and A grades increased from 24.3% to 41.6%. This might suggest that it was State schools, with their wider range of pupil abilities that saw the biggest fall in entries, as schools struggling to recruit music teachers axed examination courses that they could no longer staff.
Interestingly, a by-produce of the break-up of schools into many academy trusts might have meant that opportunities for collaboration between schools also declined after 2010, and the Academies Act.
How bad has the challenge of recruiting teachers of music been over the past few years? Were the ITT targets set by the DfE, and based upon the DfE’s own Teacher Supply Model accurate or over-optimistic in the need for teachers of music in state schools?
Pool
Music
Jan
Feb
March
April
May
June
Sept
Oct
Nov
Dec
251
2019
227
185
116
55
-57
-104
-253
-172
-196
-215
256
2020
205
146
77
24
-59
-86
-117
-144
-162
-171
416
2021
390
358
303
243
161
117
78
45
14
-9
315
2022
256
208
119
12
-128
-214
-305
-352
-395
-422
228
2023
156
81
-3
-126
-278
-356
2024
2025
330
2026
265
Data from TeachVac and dataforeducation
The table starts with the ‘pool’ of music trainees likely to be available to state schools that year and reduces it by one for every vacancy recorded during the year. The minus number is the excess of vacancies over the ‘pool ‘number
Between 2018 and 2023, only the cohort of trainees recruited during Covid, and entering the labour market in 2021, provided sufficient trainee numbers to have allowed schools to be secure in filling vacancies for September.
Of course, in addition to new entrants to teaching there are those returning to teaching or entering from other sectors, such as further education or independent schools.
As a rule of thumb, perhaps half of vacancies might be filled by new entrants, and the other half from other sources. The data in the table would suggest that in most years, if demand from private schools was also taken into account, the labour market would need to have ensured a steady supply of ‘returners’ to fill all the advertised vacancies for music teacher posts.
Each year, for January appointments, returners would have been critical for schools seeking to make an appointment, including those teachers returning to England from teaching in schools in the southern hemisphere, with a December year-end. Normally, somewhere around 100 vacancies for a January start were advertised each year between 2019 and 2022.
So, why, if there is a shortage of teachers, and the Teacher Supply Model did not seem to have been overestimated demand, was the bursary axed? Could it have been the age-old HM Treasury view that if there is a base number that would enter teacher training under any circumstances, then why pay them a bursary?
In the absence of any other explanation, it is difficult to think of any other reason than this cynical approach for the axing of the bursary for music. Put another way, Ministers just didn’t care enough about music, and weren’t aware of the contribution of all forms of music to the national wealth and our export drive to keep the bursary when it was suggested it be axed.
Sadly, the music lobby hasn’t yet changed the government’s mind. However, there is still time to do so for this recruitment round. The data showing the difference in ‘offers’ for ITT courses, between the January 2025 and January 2026 data points should, by itself, be enough to force a rethink, or a -U- turn, if you prefer it.
2026 ENTRY TO PG ITT
MUSIC
2025 TARGET
565
OFFERS JANUARY 2026
70
OFFERS JANUARY 2025
91
TOTAL OFFERS 2025
416
DIFFERENCE 2025 TOTAL AND 2025 January OFFERS
325
PROJECTION for 2026
395
ESTIMATED SHORTFALL
170
A decline in ‘offers’ from 91 to 70 is of serious concern, as these are the group most likely to be prepared to become a music teacher at whatever cost. My advice to Ministers: announce the bursary for music has been added to the list for entry in 2026 or watch the subject decline even further.
Feedback welcome through the comments section. Voices are US because of the platform used, and a free version, so that may jar with some listeners, but not with others.
The podcast is nearly 15 minutes long from a blog of less than 600 words. Does it read too much into the blog? Does it make explicit issues that are implicit in the blog. Genuinely interested in whether it adds to what I wrote or takes it over and makes it something different, and not authored by me.
By the 19th January 2026, there had been applications from 26,217 candidates. This compared with 20,771 at the January data point in 2025. Candidates applying for primary courses were up from 7,283 to 8,676: a modest increase.
For secondary courses candidate numbers this year were, 19,232 compared with 14,862 at last January’s datapoint. That looks like very good news, perhaps worthy of a Statement in Parliament.
However, it is worth delving a bit deeper into the data before putting out too much bunting. Applications from the ‘Rest of the world’ account for 8,353 of this January’s total, compared with 5,088 last January. That means that this group now account for a whopping 30% of candidates. This compares with 23% of candidates from this grouping in last January’s data.
Of even more concern, is that the numbers of candidates from the United Kingdom haven’t kept pace with the growth in overseas applicants. The growth in applicant numbers from the North of England has been especially weak; only 90 more compared with last year from the Yorkshire and The Humber region, and only 71 more from the North East.
Admittedly, the North West has seen an increase of over 400 applicants, and London, over 500 more. However, the South East only has around 140 more applicants than last year. This is around 7% more, but this percentage pales into insignificance compared to the more than two thirds increase in applicants for ‘the Rest of the World’.
The dominance of the ‘Rest of the World’ applicants as a share of the total makes commenting upon the data challenging. Normally at this time of year, I might be happy to predict those subjects likely to miss their ITT targets, based upon more than 30 years of data collection. Not knowing how the ‘Rest of the world’ applicants are spread both between primary and secondary phase, and within secondary phase by subjects adds a unique challenge to any predictions this year.
However, based upon ‘offers’, and the outcome of the 2025 ITT census, and assuming no significant change in the pattern of applications over the rest of the cycle – such as a significant weakening of the demand for new graduates or another pandemic – I am happy to make some suggestions for the outcomes based upon current trends.
I expect that Religious Education, Modern Foreign Languages, Music, Classics and the ‘other’ group will all miss their target this year.
I am not sure about biology, where offers are down by 194, but the subject reached 151% of target last year. I am also, as yet, uncertain about Geography, where offers are down, but the subject surpassed its target last year.
Despite the increase in offers, I still don’t expect Physics, Design & Technology, Business Studies and Drama to meet their targets, although on this showing they might do better than last year, assuming those with offers actually turn up when courses start: always a worry this early in the recruitment round.
On the current data, Physical Education and History, as ever, will surpass their targets. Mathematics, computing and Chemistry, should also meet their targets. I am unsure about English, where offers are down, and the subject only just beat its target in 2025.
Overall, I think that the DfE needs to consider how the statistics are presented, if a nearly a third of applicants might need a visa to train. How does this fit in with other government policies? Perhaps we can set up training courses overseas, so that these new would-be teachers from the ‘Rest of the world’ can work in the new State Schools to be established as a part of the DfE’s export drive, announced last week.
Today, Sunday 25th January 2026, marks the 14th birthday of this blog, so thanks for taking the time to read what I have written since January 2013.
Copilot tells me that 96% of blogs started in January 2013 have fallen by the wayside by 2026: but can you believe everything AI tells you?
Sadly, WordPress doesn’t publish such statistics, but it would be interesting to know how many have persevered with what is now a somewhat outdated form of communication. Unlike others, I haven’t switched to creating a podcast, although I did experiment with one way back in 2007; but that’s another story, as is the online chatroom, pioneered with the TES back in 2003.
By the time of its 14th birthday, this blog has had over 180,00 views by more than 97,000 visitors according to WordPress of the 1,59 posts that I have written since the blog started in 2013.
The most popular has been the one on ‘how much holiday do teachers really have’, with more than 6,100 views since it first appeared on the 20th May 2022.
Of course, at the opposite end of the scale, there are many posts where I have been the only person to have read what I wrote, according to WordPress. However, on Christmas Day, 2022, someone downloaded all the posts up to that date: hopefully, they also read them.
Between October 2023 and May 2025, while I was the Cabinet Member for Children’s Services on Oxfordshire County Council, I took a holiday from posting on the blog,
Since, I started writing posts again in May of 2025, after ceasing to be an elected politician, readership has been slowly increasing, to now reach double what it was at its low point. This is mostly thanks to readers from around the world once again deciding to view what I write.
So, what do I write about? Mostly education; frequently teacher supply matters – a research interest of mine for more than 40 years, if you start when I began counting vacancies for headteachers. My interest in ITT data goes back to 1987, when as a new senior leader in a School of Education I was faced with dealing with the consequences of an 100% over-recruitment on a primary PGCE.
I am most proud of the wok on Jacob’s Law, to ensure all children have a school place even if they move home mid-year, as often happens when a child is taken into care. No school with spare places should ever refuse such a child a place. What to do if they are bright enough for a grammar school place when moving from a comprehensive system is a question the government still needs to address.
The blog will continue into its next year, but as I approach my 80th birthday in 2027, perhaps the blog won’t make its 20th birthday: who knows. And, finally another reason for not producing a podcast; you cannot see the data tables, include din many of the posts.
Just over a decade ago, it seemed possible that higher education might no longer have a future in teacher training. The talk was all about schools, and training teachers where they were needed, rather than on university campuses that weren’t necessarily located in the places where teachers were required by schools.
Indeed, even as long ago as the mid-1990s, when School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) first rally started, many of the early SCITTS were located where higher education provision was lacking, such as along the north bank of the Thames estuary.
Looking back to 2013, and you can find this post in my Book*, there seemed a real threat to the future of higher education continuing with ITT. Sadly, we lost the Open University, with its mature entrant focus, and a couple of other providers at that time.
Fortunately, the decision by Ministers to ignore the Teacher Supply Model targets in 2013, and overinflate the number of ITT places allocated, compared with the predicted need for teachers by schools, offered higher education a lifeline, while a rethink took place behind the scenes.
Fast forward to the present day, and we have seen postgraduate routes now dominate both secondary and primary ITT. Despite the High Potential route (think Teach First) and the salaried schemes that replaced the former Employment-based route of the GTTP, fee-based training still dominates the landscape for ITT.
What will happen in the future for ITT if the present murmuring about graduate debt becomes an issue, and graduate reject the idea of adding a fourth year of debt at high interest rates to their ‘graduate tax’, is an issue for another post.
What is interesting is the present balance between higher education and SCITTS in the postgraduate fee-paying ITT market. Helpfully, the DfE has some data in the annual ITT census.
202223
202324
202425
202526
increase candidates
% increase candidates
in cycle accept rate
PG fee-funded
HEI
58%
46%
41%
43%
PG fee-funded
SCITT
47%
41%
45%
47%
candidates
PG fee-funded HEI
31,020
36,514
39,910
41,170
10,150
33%
PG fee-funded SCITT
16,334
19,056
20,547
21,827
5,493
34%
There are several interesting points about this Table. Both routes have seen an increase in candidates between the 2022/23 cycle and the 2025/26 cycle – the present group of postgraduate trainees currently preparing to be a teacher.
On the face of it, acceptance rates in higher education have fallen significantly, from 58% in 2022/23 to 43%, for the current group of trainees, while SCITT acceptance rates have increased. It is worth saying, in passing that had acceptance rates not increased, the flow of new teachers into schools would have been even worse than it has been post-covid.
Is there an explanation for the fall in HEI in-cycle acceptance rates. Clearly more candidates might mean more choice, but whereas for SCITTs more candidates meant more acceptances, for HEIs it has meant the opposite. One reason for this might be the increase in overseas applicants. Such applicants might be more familiar with higher education courses rather than SCITTs, so may have disproportionally applied to universities, and that may well have affected acceptance rates. I will try to consider the data around this issue in another post.
Wha t s clear, from the data, is that unless Ministers revise their policy when falling rolls means fewer training places over the next few years, the fee-paying ITT sector for postgraduate courses will see a place for higher education. This was not the outcome many feared might be the case.
However, it will be the attitude of students to debt levels that may influence the future shape of postgraduate, and indeed all ITT, over the next few years.
If would-be trainees refuse to take on more debt, perhaps we might even see the return of the training grant, phased out in 2010 in favour of bursaries and scholarships.
If I was a policy-maker, I would be watching the signs carefully about student’s attitude to debt, especially among current undergraduates.
*Teachers, Schools and views on Education by John Howson. Available from Amazon as an e-book for £9, or as a paperback
At the time, I pointed out to the DfE that TeachVac was already doing most of what was required, and for free. As my post above shows, the editor of the TES at the time also had something to say.
Sadly, and probably because of procurement rules – although the DfE could have sanctioned a trial of TeachVac to understand the requirements of any vacancy site – the DfE spent public money procuring a site that wasn’t fit for purpose. At least with the browser I use, the site still has significant shortcomings from the point of view of jobhunters.
Although free to use, it is not mandatory for state schools to use the DfE site, so, some do, and some don’t. This leaves jobseekers with the need to search more than one site to check for all vacancies: not a good idea at the best of times, and certainly not when falling rolls make jobs harder to come by.
The DfE site also has its idiosyncrasies. Although it tells users that jobs appear with the most recent first, that isn’t always the case. Page two of a list may well start with a duplication of some jobs from page one, and new jobs, not recorded earlier may pop up almost anywhere in a listing.
Perhaps.it might be better to lists jobs by closing dates, as that is what matters to many jobseekers: do I have time to apply for this job?
Some vacancies appear with either very short – is there an internal candidate – or very long periods between advert and closing date. The latter schools risk losing candidates to schools that are fleeter of foot in the recruitment process, and being left with only candidates that they wouldn’t want to appoint, except in those areas where there is an over-supply of teachers.
As job hunting is such a key part of their members’ work-life, I have always been surprised that the teacher associations haven’t been more vocal with the DfE in demanding a cheap and purposeful job board, using the best of modern technology at the lowest cost to schools. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, as when I tried to sell the idea of TeachVac in 2013, there was no interest.
Now I am once again researching vacancies, I can cheerfully say, mixing up TLA, technicians and other non-teaching jobs with teaching vacancies, and including random jobs like a drama post or TV and film vacancy in the music vacancy list strikes me as irritating, but perhaps it is good to persuade teachers to look beyond their original search criteria?
I am sure the DfE could make money by inviting private schools to use their site. I have seen a couple of vacancies for such schools on the DfE site, but it is overwhelmingly state schools.
Perhaps it is time for a rethink of the most cost-effective way for schools to recruit teachers and candidates to find the vacancies?
Primary schools are no longer the 5-11 schools of yesteryear. Even before the present cycle of falling rolls started affecting schools, especially in London, schools across the primary sector had been extending their age range downwards into what has traditionally been seen as the province of state nursery schools and the private sector.
The data from autumn 2025 vacancies has been analysed from some 254 primary schools covering the age range up to age eleven and starting at the age of five or below that age – thus, not including infant schools, as they don’t go up to age eleven.
The table below shows the results
Age range of school
number
Percentage of total
2-11
36
14%
3-11
95
38%
4-11
105
41%
5-11
18
7%
3-11 or 4-11 schools dominated the schools that advertised for a headteacher during autumn 2025, accounting for 80% of the total. Interestingly, there were more adverts for 2-11 schools than for the traditional 5-11 primary schools. Such downward extension of age ranges should help to answer the question, what do primary schools do with children not toilet trained? The answer, as you extend the age range downwards, and the likelihood of such an occurrence increases, must be to put in place expertise to deal with the situation as well as to seek government measures to help parents understand the importance of children being able to cope in social settings such as schools.
As more primary schools face falling rolls, and hence the probability of unused space within the school site, will these schools also extend their age range downwards to become 2-11 schools? If so, and I see no real reason why they wouldn’t do so, what will this do to the private nursery and childminder markets?
Fewer children, more competition, and the ability for families to drop all their children aged between 5-11 in the same place must be a powerful selling point for state primary schools, especially if the additional children recruited to the school roll replace revenue lost to schools from falling rolls, especially at a time when the school funding formula is heavily predicated upon pupil numbers.
Are 2-11 schools evenly distributed across England? The sample of 36 such schools from the autumn term is too small to yet make a definitive judgement. To do so one would need to interrogate the DfE’s database of schools, but the results are interesting. In the 2025 survey, two regions, the North West (10) and the West Midlands (8) account for half of the 2-11 schools that advertised for a new headteacher during the autumn of 2025.
While there was no region without any adverts from such schools, three regions, London, the East Midlands and the North East only had one school of 2-11 recorded in the survey. The East of England had two schools in the survey, and the South East, three schools. Yorkshire and the Humber and the South West regions each had five schools in the survey from the 2-11 age range.
Might extending their age range downwards be a solution to some schools in London facing possible closure from falling rolls? It is certainly a question worth asking if it can increase the schools’ income to a point where it remains financially viable and able to service its community.
2026 marks the National Year of Reading, sponsored by the National Literacy Trust and the DfE. There is a somewhat odd logo of ’GO ALL IN’ for the year that I am afraid leaves me cold. This is despite the fact that as an author, blog writer and general supporter of words, in visual as well as spoken form, I fully support the aim of the Year, to see more people reading for pleasure; especially young people.
Of course, reading can be for purposes other than pleasure, although, for many, reading for research can itself be a great pleasure. This was brought home to me earlier today when I was listening to the BBC4 radio programme at 0815 that used to be a service of Sunday worship. These days, the format is more catholic in nature.
Today’s programme celebrated the 500th anniversary in 2026 of the publication of William Tyndale’s New Testament. This was the first part of the bible to be published, by the still relatively new printing process, in the vernacular English, rather than the Vulgate Latin, used in the Mass by the churches of the day.
What sent me off on research of the printed word was the extract from 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 used in the programme, where the reader used the word ‘love’.
As someone brought up before the publication in the 1960s of the New English Bible, this well-known passage has always been associated with the words of the Authorised or King Jame’s version of the bible. In that version, the word ‘charity’ not ‘love’ is used to describe the Greek ‘agape’.
Was this a Trump moment for the BBC Religious Affairs department, where the modern word ‘love’ was substituted in the reading for ‘charity’, or did Tyndale use the word ‘love’?
As the radio programme suggested that 80% of the Authorised Version used the text of Tyndale’s translation, this was a point worth clarification. Reading the text seemed to be the best way to allay my concerns, as the programme didn’t mention this change of wording between the two versions.
Happily, these days we can both read a version of Tyndale’s Testament and the King James version on-line. We can even ask AI – in my case, copilot – to do the heavy lifting of finding websites online with the text of both versions, and why the words were changed.
Here is what copilot told me
Why “charity” in the KJV instead of Tyndale’s “love”?
The decision was deliberate, not accidental. The KJV translators knew Tyndale had used “love,” but they chose “charity” because they believed it captured a more specific, more theological, and more communal nuance of the Greek word ἀγάπη (agapē).
And here are the links to sites I used before asking copilot why the change was made
This simple exercise remined me why I value reading so much, and helped me see the BBC used the correct words in their programme, even though a bit of explanation for this key difference might have saved my research, but also prevented this blog from being written. Thanks to the producer of the programme for stimulating my interest.
Finally, a somewhat tenuous link between Tyndale’s testament and this blog’s early days. In October 2013, in the post No time for God | John Howson I wrote of the fact that Michael Gove, as Secretary of State for Education, has ordered a copy of the King James Bible to be sent to every school.
The BBC programme remined me that nearly 500 years ago, Thomas Cromwell had ordered a copy of Tyndale’s New Testament to be sent to every parish church in England. I wonder whether Michael Gove had that act in mind when he made his decision to send the King James Version to every school.
Certainly, for those of us schooled before the 1960s, the language of the Tyndale and King James testaments is both archaic in places, but is also wonderful, especially when read aloud.
‘Verily, verily, I say unto you’, may be as archaic as much of Shakespeare, but it rolls of the tongue.
So, whether it is reading for purpose, reading for meaning or just reading for enjoyment, let us all support 2026 and the National Year of Reading.
What’s in a name? I suspect that St Mary’s, albeit in a myriad of different forms, probably remains the most popular name for a school; certainly, for primary schools. For some reason, it seems like it is less common to use the name of a saint in the name of a church secondary school. The exception to this rule seems to be where the saint was a Martyr, and especially and English martyr.
However, with the growth of academies, is a new trend developing of including the name of the operator of the Multi Academy Trust to which the school belongs in the schools’ name? I was alerted to this possibility when entering headteacher vacancies. Recruiting headteachers in 2025 – a mixed picture | John Howson
In the course of entering vacancies, I came across a school called: ‘Saracens Broadfields’. Now, I have always associated The Saracens with a rugby union club, originating, I believe, in Southgate. This school provides no indication of its location in its name, but it is located elsewhere in outer London.
Some MATs, such as Dixons, provide both the brand name, Dixons, plus the location in the name of the school in the names of many of their schools.
Of course, it is important to know the group responsible for a school, and in the days before websites, when parents had to rely upon the noticeboard by the school gate, that noticeboard used to display the local authority, diocese or other operator of the school alongside the school’s name. In practice, most schools still have noticeboards, and these boards still contain the same information. However, it is often more of a challenge to find who is responsible for a school from its website.
Happily, the DfE has a solution, as the details of a school on the DfE information portal contain the name of any academy trust, diocese, local authority or other operator. This makes it possible to see all the schools under the control of the operator; very helpful where the schools are spread across several different local authority areas, as is the case with many dioceses, and a growing number of academy trusts.
Apart from Queen Elizabeth, and various Henry’s, royalty does feature highly in school names. These are usually references to Tudor monarchs that help establish the schools from with the current school can trace its lineage. A few politicians, often former education ministers, such as Ellen Wilkinson and Rab Butler have been honoured to have schools named after them. Some other famous people have had local schools named after them, such as Sir Malcolm Sarget in Stamford and Sir Frank Whittle in Coventry. Florence Nightingale has a primary school named after her, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson has a secondary school bearing her name, although from its web site it would be a challenge to discover why the school had that name, and that seems a shame.
So will schools be unceasingly likely to display their brand in their names. If so, what will happen when a school is traded between MATS for some reason or other. Clearly, the name will have to change.
Let me finish this post, the first of 2026, by wishing readers all the best for the New Year. May 2026 be a good year for you.
John Howson 