Teacher reimbursement scheme could boost retention

Analysis from the National Foundation For Educational Research (NFER) has found that a student loan reimbursement scheme could be considered as an effective policy tool to boost teacher retention.
 
Teacher student loan reimbursement (TSLR) is a policy whereby the government pays back the amount of money paid by teachers in the previous financial year for their student loan repayments.

The research, commissioned by the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers (NASBTT) and the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET), examined whether student loan reimbursements could improve teacher retention.
 
Sarah Tang, economist in NFER’s Centre for Policy and Practice Research, said: “Our analysis shows that introducing a new TSLR scheme could be an efficient policy for improving teacher supply through encouraging more teachers to remain in the profession. Especially for shortage subjects where bursaries are already high, a TSLR scheme could be considered as part of a broad teacher recruitment and retention strategy.”
 
Using the estimates from the Department for Education (DfE) pilot of a TSLR scheme in 2018 for state sector teachers in certain shortage subjects and in the first 10 years of their teaching career, researchers at NFER modelled the likely impact of introducing a new TSLR scheme for all teachers in their first 10 years of teaching.
 
NFER estimated that after one year of the scheme there could be around 2,100 additional teachers, who would have been expected to otherwise leave teaching in the state sector if there was no TSLR scheme. The cost of the scheme for one year is around £245 million, which is around the total current spend on training bursaries.  
 
Having estimated the cost of a TSLR scheme, NFER then modelled what the increase in teachers might be from instead spending the same money on bursaries or early-career retention payments.