Parents, voters, ministers – do the maths: if we run out of teachers, who will teach our children? | Gaby Hinsliff

It’s a recruitment and retention emergency when even desirable schools can’t fill vacancies. This is what a crisis looks like

Lucy Kellaway loves teaching. She came to it remarkably late, deciding to retrain at 58 after a long career in financial journalism, but is so evangelical about the switch that she set up a charity to help others do the same. Now Teach has since supported more than 800 people into the classroom, many leaving lucrative careers in banking or law and disproportionately entering areas of desperate shortage, such as science and maths. Though still a relatively tiny drop in the educational ocean, the scheme was growing, with expressions of interest among over-50s up 52% last year. But perhaps its real value, amid a relentless barrage of offputting stories from the chalkface, is that its optimistic stories of midlife reinvention caught the imagination of people seeking more meaning in their working lives, making teaching sound like an aspirational and emotionally rewarding thing to do.

Well, not any more. After the Department for Education abruptly scrapped its grant, this September’s intake will be Now Teach’s last unless a solution can be found. Another bright spot snuffed out, rounding out what has been a very dark week for veteran teachers clinging on by their fingernails to a career that they, too, once used to love.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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