I am a teacher and I love my job. There are thousands like me around the country. And yet there’s a real danger that we will soon be a vanishing breed.
The most recent teacher recruitment figures published last week make for grim reading. Compared with the data for 2019, the last set of pre-Covid figures, the number of applicants for teacher training is down 8 per cent for primary teachers and 23 per cent for secondary. Among the individual subjects, physics is currently attracting scarcely 20 per cent of the total required, while even English is only at 80 per cent. Not enough people, it would seem, are convinced of the merits of the teaching profession.
