Recruitment crisis: Teacher training bursaries vs teacher retention payments

The research paper has been published by the National Foundation for Education Research (Worth & McLean, 2025) and focuses on the impact of five specific retention payment schemes.

It suggests that the payments could help to keep early career teachers in the classroom, especially in shortage subjects – but the evidence is “far from conclusive”.

As such, the NFER is advising ministers that retention payment schemes need to be “carefully targeted and used alongside high bursaries and wider recruitment and retention strategies”.

The research considers the impact of all five schemes that have been piloted since 2018:

All five provide targeted payments to teachers in the early years of their careers (usually within the first five years, with loan reimbursements paid to teachers in their first 10 years) who are teaching shortage secondary subjects (including maths, physics, chemistry, computing, languages and biology).