While teaching 30 12-year-olds about the Cold War may sound like torture to some, Will, a recent Cambridge graduate now training to teach, recounts his first time teaching a history lesson with excitement. “I got to bring out a really interesting and exciting and effective allegory where we talked about how you might compete with a student at a school who you didn’t really like, but […] you’re not allowed to fight them. So you have to find other ways to compete with them to prove you’re better. I had people shouting out ideas about, you know, I’ll run faster than them at the track, I’ll do better at my GCSEs than them, I’ll have more friends than them.”

Will and I attended the same comprehensive school, and we reminisce about a particularly inspiring History teacher who nurtured Will’s love of the subject and helped both of us with Oxbridge admissions. He hopes to return the favour to the students of the St Ives school he has begun working at and tells me, “Sometimes you are going to a school where no one has been to Oxbridge before, and there is no one who knows how the system works.”

“The new Labour government is putting improving Britain’s education at the core of its mission to improve social mobility against a backdrop of severe teacher shortages”

The new Labour government is putting improving Britain’s education at the core of its mission to improve social mobility against a backdrop of severe teacher shortages. Since the quality of education is reliant on the quality of teachers, I spoke to some of Cambridge’s aspiring teachers and asked them how more graduates can be encouraged to follow in their footsteps.

In pursuing a profession that many of his generation consider underpaid and overly demanding, Will, enrolled in the Teach First scheme, is motivated by a sense of moral purpose. The sentiment was shared by a group of 3rd-year classicists, all of whom plan to train to teach after graduating. As classics is not taught at most state schools, they emphasised their desire to widen opportunities for students to get interested in the thing they were passionate about. One of them, Rory, told me, “I went into secondary not particularly knowing what it [Classics] was.” An “inspiring teacher” sparked his interest, and he hoped to do the same for a future generation of Classicists.

A recent report from teacher training organisation Teach First, which surveyed 3,031 16-to-24-year-olds on their views on teaching as a career, found that most young people agree that teaching is a fulfilling and important career. However, though most (73%) saw teaching as a job “that had purpose”, significant numbers saw it as stressful (42%), poorly paid (36%) and believed the sector had inadequate funding (36%).

“There comes a point where you make teaching so unattractive as a career that people don’t do it”

I spoke to teacher recruitment expert and Oxfordshire County Councillor John Howson to hear his thoughts on the teacher supply crisis. He diagnosed its cause with a blunt statement: “There comes a point where you make teaching so unattractive as a career that people don’t do it.” He continued, “It’s all very well saying: ‘We’re putting VAT on private schools so we get all this extra income’, which is fine – how are you going to use that extra income to get more teachers.” referencing government plans to recruit 6,500 more teachers. “It will pay for more teachers, but you’ve got to work out: do you make teaching more attractive, or do you just assume that because you’ve got more money, more teachers will miraculously appear?”

The question, then, is how to make a career in teaching more attractive. The Teach First report makes several recommendations, including increasing the salary teachers receive (the most impactful incentive amongst the young people surveyed) and improving work-life balance and flexibility. It also advocates integrating opportunities for teachers to gain work experience in other fields into training, finding that having varied and engaging careers is important to Gen Z.

When putting this to Cambridge’s aspiring teachers, it produced mixed responses. Betty, another aspiring classics teacher, pushed back against the suggestion that the terms of trade of teaching were a significant barrier. She felt it had a competitive pay offer and saw the long holidays provided to teachers as a significant incentive.

Will, however, was aware that peers interested in teaching were being put off, saying, “I know a lot of people who are really interested in and considered going into teaching, you know, everyone has teachers who have inspired them, it’s very easy to make it an attractive job in theory, it’s just that, right now, it’s not an attractive offer.”

Making it an “attractive offer” does not mean relying solely on high salaries to attract applicants, but it does mean preventing non-competitive salaries from putting off good quality graduates from teaching. Will told me, “You can’t just make teaching the best-paid job in the country, and that be the reason you want people to go into it because it’s too important for that, you need people who are impassioned by it”. However, when people who are impassioned by teaching are being actively put off, it is clear something needs to change. As Howson said, “Although pay is not a front-line driver of people wanting to become a teacher, there is a point at which the pay about other graduate careers […] becomes a detractor.”

One proposal that particularly appealed to some of the people I spoke to was including opportunities for work experience in other fields in teacher training. Will liked the fact that Teach First “deliberately style themselves as ‘teach first’ with the idea that you could go on to do other things afterwards if you wanted.” Monty, another classicist aspiring to teach, also sought a career that could involve jobs other than teaching. He was interested in writing educational materials and resources, viewing teaching as a first step toward this. Betty and Rory, however, were less drawn to the idea of teaching as a first step in a more varied career – for them, it was the job of teaching itself that they felt interested them the most and was the most rewarding.

When I asked Will to explain to me why encouraging graduates to get into teaching mattered so much, he simply remarked that the best way to guarantee a good education was to put “a great teacher in the room”. Having great teachers means encouraging more young people like Will, Betty, Rory and Monty to choose the career path. For Howson, this means a staffing review that would see central government reevaluate the offer it is making to graduates. One hopes that with education secretary Bridget Philipson declaring her intention to make “teaching the go-to profession for our best graduates”, the new government might finally take seriously the fact that not enough young people are getting into teaching.