We turned 1,000 execs into teachers. Now our funding’s been scrapped

In 2017, when I was just 58, I quit my cushy job as a Financial Times columnist and retrained as a maths teacher in an east London comprehensive. At the same time, I co-founded a charity aimed at people like me who were done with their long professional careers and wanted to start again doing something more useful.

I can’t remember what I expected at the time. It now strikes me as an act of sublime hubris to have been gung-ho about persuading derivatives traders and corporate execs to jack in their well-paid jobs and become teachers when I didn’t have a clue about what life in the classroom was like.

Seven years on, Now Teach — and my own teaching career — has gone better than could reasonably have been expected. Since 2017, we have recruited more than 1,000 older professionals, including an ex-monk, a hostage negotiator and a Nasa scientist, who all swapped jobs they were very good at for the uncertain challenges of the classroom. Every year, the number of candidates grows. As for me, I am now such an old hand at teaching I have more or less forgotten the bone-crushing humiliation of that first lesson, when I lost control of 30 hostile 13-year-olds.

At a Now Teach strategy day last month, we cheerfully plotted the next seven years: further national expansion and further ways of deploying the experience of our teachers. None of us around that table expected what happened next.

A few days later, our chief executive was called into a meeting with the Department for Education (DfE) and told there would be no more money. The government, which has funded us for the past five years, said it appreciated what we had done but was pulling the plug.

The DfE appears to be in financial meltdown. Last year, teachers got a pay rise of 6.5 per cent but the Treasury has declined to pay for it, leaving the ministry with an estimated hole in its budget of £1.5 billion. In a panic, it seems to be cutting everything and anything that is not ring-fenced, with no plan or thought for the future. We are one of many optimistic little charities trying to improve things in education now in danger of extinction.

I remember my first meeting with Nick Gibb, then schools minister, in which I explained what the charity does: we hunt down potential teachers, we vet them, we match them with schools and then we support them in their new job. “Splendid,” Gibb said, and asked his mandarins to find us some money.

At that strategy day in March, we did actually discuss the risk of having 85 per cent of our money coming from the DfE, but concluded we were safe. We were simply too small to fail. Our funding was £1.4 million a year (spent almost entirely on staff salaries), which for the department is a mere rounding error. And with every year that passed, we were becoming more important: nearly two thirds of last year’s Now Teachers taught Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths), which the government struggles most to recruit. They couldn’t risk axing us.

Our entire education system is a mess, but the shortage of people wanting to be teachers is the gravest threat it faces. The government has missed its target for recruitment for the past 11 years. Last year it missed it by 50 per cent.

It’s true that only around one per cent of total teaching trainees are older career-changers, but this cohort is also bucking the recruitment trend. On current projections, the number of trainees over 40 is likely to rise by 50 per cent this year, perhaps because they are less attached to working from home. Many switchers report a surprising status rise from their new job: one woman who used to have a senior role in the Home Office said that for the first time people at parties were eager to talk about her work — they were far more interested in the horror, the humour and the hope of the classroom than they ever were in the life of a bureaucrat.

One of my favourite examples of a career-changer is Phong Dinh, a Vietnamese refugee from Saigon who was inspired by an exceptional teacher to go to law school. He went on to be first a lawyer and then, yes, a derivatives trader, before becoming that exceptional teacher himself to scores of maths students at comprehensives in south London.

The axing of Now Teach sits uncomfortably with another of the government’s supposed objectives: to keep an ageing population working. The aim is a good one but so far it has no policies: the best that Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, has come up with is the idea that over-50s should get on their bikes and deliver takeaways.

Now Teach directly addresses Britain’s demographic problem. It reassures people it is not too late to retrain in a new profession, shows them how to do so and then supports them through the first years. Much as Teach First did for new graduates, I hoped that one day we would spawn similar schemes to get fiftysomethings to retrain as nurses, police officers, journalists — anything at all. I was particularly keen on a scheme for older trainee clerics, which I imagined could be called Now Preach.

As the DfE pulled the plug on Now Teach, it offered us what it might have considered a carrot. In the summer, it will sit down to work out how to set up a new scheme for recruiting, retaining and supporting older career-changers, and said it might like our advice. We would love to help of course, but we have a problem: though we will continue to support all the people we have recruited so far, we may not exist by then — unless we can find some philanthropists to save us.

In all this, the government has lost sight of the only thing that matters. It is a point I have just been teaching my A-level economics students: the best way of getting long-term economic growth is through improving education. And the best way of doing that is by finding great teachers.