City victims of crunch could ease teacher shortage

City workers facing redundancy could help ease a shortage of teachers in London.

Officials hope victims of the credit crunch may be prepared to switch careers for the greater job security of teaching.

Figures from the Training and Development Agency for Schools show the number of people enquiring about becoming a teacher has risen almost 34 per cent since the start of the economic crisis.

Some London boroughs have three times as many classroom jobs unfilled as the national average.

Ministers said a scheme to put top graduates in tough schools was helping to solve staff shortages. Department-for Children figures show:

560 teaching posts were unfilled in London's schools, representing a fifth of vacancies in England.

The teacher vacancy rate in London - 1.1 per cent of jobs - was far higher than the national average of 0.7 per cent, and up from 1.0 per cent last year.

In Westminster the vacancy rate was 2.6 per cent, nearly four times that of England as a whole.

The highest number of vacancies was in Newham, where 45 teaching posts were vacant.

A Department for Children spokesman said: "Teaching is now the second most popular career choice for graduates. Recruitment has improved in London but there is more to do. "We are targeting graduates with bursaries and 'golden hellos' and expanding Teach First, which puts top university students into challenging, inner-city schools." Meanwhile, the National Union of Teachers will ballot members on another national strike over pay next month, following the action that closed thousands of schools in April.

Christine Blower, the union's acting general secretary, said recruitment difficulties in London were a "warning sign" to the rest of England.

"In a sense this is the litmus test for the decline in salaries across the country," she said. Inflation and high house prices make it hard to recruit young teachers on low salaries, said the union.

Inner London teachers training on the job can expect to earn £19,000 in their first year, rising to £25,000 once they have qualified.

Professor Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, said teachers' salaries were not very attractive when compared with other graduate jobs in London.

'CHANGE WAS A SHOCK, BUT I LOVE MY NEW JOB'

At 25, Oxford graduate Helen Bowman is doing a job she loves - partly, she says, thanks to the trouble London schools have finding staff.

Some of the problem stems from the unfair perception that London schools are full of "kids who are very streetwise and difficult", she said.

Ms Bowman is one of the successes of the Government's Teach First initiative, which places top graduates in tough schools where they learn the profession on the job.

After just three years she is head of English at the Business Academy Bexley, a school in Erith which teaches 1,420 pupils aged from 5 to 18. Though she loves the job now, it was "very hard work" at first, she said. "It was a bit of a shock. I wasn't expecting the day-to-day level of emotional engagement to be quite what it was. That was very tiring."

Now living in Lewisham, Ms Bowman left Oxford and started working as a broadcast assistant at the BBC but "there wasn't much scope for moving on" so she tried Teach First. "I ended up absolutely loving it," she said.