More than £22m has been wasted by the Welsh Assembly Government on training teachers who do not go on to teach in Wales.
New figures which I have released today, have revealed that between 2004/05 and 2007/08, Wales trained an excess of almost 3000 teachers, at a cost of over £7500 per surplus teacher.
Few steps are being taken to tackle this as only minor reductions in teacher training intake targets have been made for 2010/11.
At a time when budgets are increasingly stretched, it is wasteful and irresponsible for the Labour/Plaid government in Wales to spend taxpayers’ money on teachers that Wales does not have vacancies to employ.
The Government were advised in the 2006 Furlong Report to cut the number of training places in half but this advice has not been heeded. The Education Minister stated in 2008 that she would be supporting a reduction of 50 per cent of training places in primary and 25 per cent reduction in secondary training places, but this saving has not taken place.
With education spending already £500 per pupil less than in England, Wales can ill afford to be subsidising the English education system. In maths, for example, we have trained 133 teachers at a cost of £1.1 million who are not teaching in Wales at all.
Labour in London has saddled us the largest budget deficit in UK peacetime history. Meanwhile in Wales, they have wasted £22 million on a programme to train teachers who don’t teach.
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Let’s put this into context. This year alone only 300 out of the 3000 teachers who have just qualified in Scotland have a permanant position at the start of the new term. The £22 million is only wasted if the person who has trained as a teacher is unable to find employment any where in the UK. If they obtain employment as a teacher outside Wales then this isn’t ‘a waste of public money’ given that the Assembly obtains the bulk of its revenue from the UK government. Historically Wales has always exported teachers to the benefit of the rest of the UK. I might have completed my PGCE in Wales but my first post by choice was in England. The real issue is not what has happened in the past since the odds are given the huge amount of extra money that education has received in the last 13 years the majority of those who have qualified as teachers will have found employment. What is important is what is going to happen in the future because the UK Coalition government has not promised to protect education spending when the Comprehensive Spending Review is announcd on October 20th. If this is the case then many young teachers now in training are going to find it very difficult if not impossible to find employment. I know that in my authority heads have already been warned that their budgets could be reduced by 3% from April 2011.