Johnson announces £3000 ‘levelling up premium’

Boris Johnson used his speech to the Conservative Party conference in Manchester to announce a £3000 ‘levelling up premium’, which he said would ‘send the best maths and science teachers to the places that need them most’. The aim of the new premium is to ensure that talented early career teachers are incentivised to work in schools in disadvantaged areas. It will target teachers in the first five years of their career in maths, physics, chemistry and computing. Although announced as a new policy,  following Mr Johnson’s speech it was pointed out that the government had only recently scrapped the similar ‘early career payments’ scheme, which also sought to offer additional money to maths, physics, chemistry and languages teachers. Mr Johnson also used his speech to reference east London school Brampton Manor Academy as ‘proof of what I mean by unleashing potential’. Last year the school, which is an 11-18 academy in East Ham, sent more pupils to Oxbridge than Eton College. In his speech Mr Johnson described Brampton Manor Academy as a ‘school anyone could send their kids to’, although the sixth form is selective, with prospective pupils having to achieve a minimum grade point average of 6.5 across all their GCSEs, with 7s in the subjects they wish to study at A Level. (In practice these minimum requirements are often higher where courses are oversubscribed.)

Elsewhere at the conference Nadhim Zahawi used his speech to pay tribute to the ‘kind, patient, dedicated teachers’ who had helped him to learn English and flourish after he arrived in the UK as an 11 year old refugee from Iraq. He also said he would ‘be led by evidence’ in the decisions he takes as education secretary, and would ‘relentlessly focus on what works’. Describing his approach to the role, he said that he intends to be the ‘secretary of state for aspiration and opportunity and skills’. There were few announcements of new policy in his address, but Mr Zahawi did indicate he would bring forward a ‘schools white paper’ next year which would outline plane to tackle innumeracy and illiteracy.  On teacher training he said that ‘as the foundation of the next decade of reform during this parliament we will deliver 500,000 teacher training opportunities. We are carrying out a fundamental overhaul that will make this country the best in the world to train and learn as a teacher’. The government’s recent proposals on reforming initial teacher training have proved controversial with existing providers, but it is not clear at this stage if under Mr Zahawi there will be changes to the plans put forward so far.