The government’s pathetic response to the Now Teach scandal

One Saturday last July, a couple of hundred people gathered in a conference centre on the bank of the Thames to talk about education. In an earlier life they were lawyers, bankers, engineers, publishers and software engineers, but now they are all secondary school teachers and here they were giving up part of their weekend to talk about how better to help the kids they teach and the schools they work in.

All these people joined the profession through Now Teach, the charity I co-found in 2017 when I was still a columnist on the Financial Times. Back then, at the age of 58, I wanted to become a teacher but didn’t know how to begin. Surely, I thought, given that schools struggle to find teachers and that many ageing professionals out there want to retrain to do something meaningful, there should be an organisation aimed at putting the two together. There wasn’t, so I joined forces with Katie Waldegrave, an ex-teacher, to set one up.

As I surveyed the room, I marvelled not only at how many of the 800 or so teachers we’ve recruited so far had turned up, but at their sheer enthusiasm for teaching – even after a grim year of strikes, Ofsted terror and unbearable workload.

That spirit of optimism seems like another world. The Department for Education has just informed us that it is cutting our funding. We have done nothing wrong it seems: it has simply been cleaned out by the teacher pay rise, which is costing an estimated £1.5 billion, and so it can no longer afford the £1.4 million a year it pays us.