PERC Seminar: Financial incentives and maths teacher recruitment: evidence from an observational impact evaluation

England faces a severe shortage of secondary school teachers, particularly in STEM subjects. The Department for Education has responded by introducing a variety of financial incentives for the recruitment and retention of teachers in shortage subjects. One such policy - the Phased Maths bursary - reduced the incentive for maths initial teacher training from £25,000 to £20,000 but simultaneously introduced up to £15,000 of new retention incentives paid during the first five years of maths teachers’ careers. In this talk, I will present an impact evaluation using comparative interrupted time series methods to quantify the impact of the policy on recruitment to maths initial teacher training. In addition to investigating the overall impact, I attempt to isolate the impact of different components of the bursary and the timing of the payments.