Tories’ ‘Troops to Teachers’ scheme flops, after just 28 veterans qualify as teachers over five years

• This failure is an embarrassment for David Cameron who made personal assurances two years ago to “make sure it’s working”.

• New figures show that only 28 veterans qualified on the Government’s flagship ‘Troops to Teachers’ over the last Parliament.

• The Tories’ half-hearted approach to the scheme has seen applications plummet by almost 80 per cent over three cohorts.

• This follows the damning NAO report last week, which criticised the Government for creating teacher shortages amid their failure to recruit enough trainee teachers for the last four years in a row.
  

Lucy Powell MP, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, commenting on the missed targets, said:

“This is more evidence in a series of failures by the Tory Government to get a hold on the teacher shortage crisis. Teacher recruitment continues to threaten standards under the Tories, and yet despite David Cameron’s personal commitment to the scheme, the Government has only managed to get 28 veterans to qualify as teachers.

“I very much want to see more veterans re-training to become teachers as they have a huge amount to offer and we desperately need more good teachers.  What’s clear is that, as with the government’s general slow response to teacher shortages, this scheme isn’t working because the government isn’t focusing on teacher recruitment.  We urgently need a proper strategy for teacher recruitment including of veterans for whom this could make a great second career.”