Maths teacher shortage to be addressed in Poole schools

It has been estimated that Britain’s schools need to find 17,000 people who can teach the subject in the next five years.

Now the Poole Teaching School Alliance, led by Broadstone First School, has won £45,000 from government towards retraining people who are already qualified to teach in other subjects.

Andy Oldman, who teaches maths at Poole Grammar School, secured the money.

He said: “The government has identified an urgent need to get far more maths teachers trained. They’ve offered us quite a lot of money to train teachers.

“Those may be returners to the profession who have been taking a career break or they could be teachers who are in schools teaching other subjects, or even from feeder schools who would like to upskill in the same way.”

He added: “There’s very much a narrowing of the curriculum which is going to take place over the next two to three years.

“It may be the case that people see this as where they need to be going if they’re teaching a subject which isn’t one of those core subjects.”

The Borough of Poole has recently been criticised by the Department for Education over poor maths results at key stage two in local schools.

Mr Oldman said the crisis in maths teaching was the result of a “perfect storm”, with “not enough people coming in, too many people going out and not enough being retained”.

“We’ve been sheltered because we’re a selective school but we’re finding those issues at the moment,” he said.

“It won’t be long before we’ve got a few people heading for retirement. It will be difficult for us to recruit at some stage – but at other schools, for example, Magna Academy has advertised for four different maths posts in the last few months.”

He added: “It’s going to come to a real crunch point in the next couple of years.”

Any qualified teachers interested in taking a Teacher Subject Specialism Course – which involves around 50 hours of training over a year – should visit bit.ly/EOIPooleTSST.