§ Mr. Battleasked the Secretary of State for Education and Science if he will give details of the take-up of places in Her Majesty's Government's specially funded programme allowing qualified teachers to retrain as teachers of mathematics, physics or technology; and if he will make a statement.
§ Mrs. RumboldThis programme is run by the University Grants Committee (UGC) and the National Advisory Body for local authority higher education (NAB). No take-up figures are available for the UGC share of the programme. Returns from the NAB suggest that recruitment under this initiative for retraining and updating courses is running at about 40 per cent. This compares with an encouraging 89 per cent. for initial teacher training places.
From April 1988, in time for the start of the first full year of courses under the initiative, the Government have ring-fenced grant aid for £4 million of expenditure by local education authorities on secondments of existing teachers to long retraining courses. This should mitigate the secondment funding difficulties associated with the changeover from the old pooling arrangements to the new training grants scheme that have been one of the causes of low take-up of places this year.