The Department of Education has revealed that it is considering offering high-calibre maths and physics graduates an extra £5,000 in teaching bursaries, in an effort to address the current and increasing shortage of teachers in these subjects.

A spokesperson for the Department said: "We are keen to continue attracting the best maths and physics graduates. It is important that we are offering the incentives to ensure that we can do that. That is why we are considering increasing bursaries for high-class recruits in these subjects by £5,000.” 

In a speech at the Policy Exchange on Thursday, Education Secretary Michael Gove insisted that more needs to be done to fill the vacancies. "We will soon be announcing even greater incentives in shortage subjects, where recruitment has historically been most difficult”, he said. “We will do even more to encourage would-be teachers to study maths and physics at A-level and beyond.”

The £5,000 incentives would come on top of the £20,000 scholarships and bursaries already offered by the Institute of Mathematics and the Institute of Physics.

Gove noted the growing success of schemes like Teach First, which place top graduates in under-performing state schools for on-the-job training. Schools with Teach First participants have been shown to achieve higher GCSE grades than those without. 

However the shadow education secretary, Stephen Twigg, does not share Gove’s approval for such schemes. Speaking to The Guardian, Twigg said: “Michael Gove is undermining teacher professionalism by allowing unqualified teachers to teach in schools on a permanent basis. This is bad for school standards. He should introduce Labour's qualified teacher guarantee, committing to a qualified teacher in every classroom. 

Mathew Smith graduated this year from Trinity College with a degree in Natural Sciences and has just started teaching in Manchester with Teach First. He said: "I think the £5,000 bonus would be a good idea - the more incentives there are to teach the better. So many maths and physics graduates naturally go into banking or consulting. Maths teachers in particular, are always in short supply."

There are also other cash bonuses avaliable for graduates who go into teaching. For example, Trinity College offers £1000 to its students that go on to join Teach First.

For Cambridge graduates, however, teaching is still a somewhat unpopular choice. The most recently available figures show that out of the 2011 leavers, only 1.7 per cent of Maths graduates went into teacher training while 6.7 per cent went straight into teaching or lecturing. For Natural Sciences, the figures are similar; 1.8 per cent and 12.2 per cent respectively. This is in comparison with the 10.6 per cent of English graduates who pursued teacher training. 2012 saw 1.6 applications for every maths teacher vacancy in schools, while the ratio of applications to vacancies in arts subjects was five times higher.