Programme attracts PHD grads into classroom with four-day week

The Researchers in Schools programme has seen some success in recruiting PHD graduates into the teaching profession with the promise of a four day week.

The government backed programme works along similar lines to the Teach First scheme, with the unique angle of only recruiting trainees who have a PHD.

A major selling point of the scheme is that recruits are guaranteed to only work four days a week in the class room, with the fifth day reserved for increasing their subject expertise, championing the idea of students aiming for university, and carrying out research in their field.

The scheme attracted 629 applicants in 2015, with 77 trainees placed in September of that year, 81 per cent of which said they has not applied to any other route into teaching.

The majority of recruits through the scheme are teaching maths or physics, which are currently the subjects facing the worst recruitments problems.

Simon Coyle, co-founder of the Brilliant Club, which devised the scheme, believes that a similar approach could be used elsewhere to tackle concerns regarding workload and make teaching more attractive to high level graduates.

Coyle stressed that the fifth day out of the classroom was ‘far from being a day off’, with the first cohort of graduates on the scheme spending 887 hours helping targeted pupils prepare for university, collectively organising 21 university trips for pupils, spending 677 hours on research and 932 hours on preparing research for publication.