How to Become a Teacher in the UK (2026/27)

Becoming a teacher in England involves more routes than most people realise when they first start looking, and the sheer number of options — PGCE, School Direct (salaried and fee-funded), Teach First, assessment-only, overseas-trained teacher status — can make the whole process feel more complicated than it needs to be. This hub page exists to cut through that. Every route leads to the same legal qualification, and once you understand what that qualification actually is and what genuinely differs between the routes, choosing between them becomes a much more straightforward decision based on your own circumstances rather than guesswork.

QTS: the one legal requirement behind every route

Qualified Teacher Status, universally shortened to QTS, is the actual legal qualification that every route described on this page is working toward. It's easy to lose sight of this when comparing routes, because the marketing and branding around PGCE, School Direct and Teach First can make them feel like entirely separate careers with different endpoints. They aren't. Strip away the branding and every one of them is a training pathway that, if completed successfully, results in the same outcome: the right to teach as a fully qualified teacher in a maintained school, academy or free school in England.

This matters practically in a few ways. First, it means the "best" route genuinely is the one that suits your personal circumstances, learning style and finances best — there's no hidden hierarchy where one route produces a more valid or more employable QTS than another. A headteacher hiring a newly qualified teacher generally cares about the quality of your training experience and your classroom performance at interview, not which specific named scheme your QTS came from. Second, it means you can genuinely mix and match your research: read about funding on this page, read about the actual day-to-day differences between routes on our PGCE vs School Direct vs Teach First comparison, and treat them as complementary questions rather than entirely separate decisions.

Without QTS, you can still work in a state school as an unqualified teacher or instructor, but this sits on a distinctly lower pay scale than the Main Pay Range and typically comes with more limited scope for long-term progression until QTS is achieved. Independent (private) schools are the one significant exception here — they aren't legally required to employ only QTS-holding teachers — but the overwhelming majority of state-sector teaching careers are built around gaining QTS as early as possible.

The main routes into teaching at a glance

Five routes cover the overwhelming majority of people training to teach in England today. Here's what each one actually is, in plain terms, before we get into who each suits and how they're funded.

• • PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) — a university-led course, typically one year full-time, mixing academic study of education theory and pedagogy with substantial school-based placements. The traditional, most widely recognised route.
• • School Direct — a school-led training route where a school or group of schools (rather than a university) leads your training, though many School Direct places are still delivered in partnership with a university and lead to a PGCE alongside QTS. Comes in salaried and fee/bursary-funded variants — see the comparison guide for the difference.
• • Teach First — a charity-run, employment-based route explicitly focused on placing trainees in schools serving disadvantaged communities, with a strong emphasis on leadership development alongside classroom training. You're an employed teacher from day one.
• • Assessment-only route — a route for people who can already demonstrate they meet the Teachers' Standards without further structured training, typically because of substantial existing unqualified teaching experience. Rare, and strict on eligibility.
• • Overseas-trained teacher QTS route — for teachers who trained and qualified outside the UK and want their qualification recognised for English state schools. Expanded to be free-of-charge from August 2025 for those who trained outside the UK, according to gov.uk.

Who each route actually suits

Rather than treating this as an abstract comparison, it's more useful to think about which route matches your actual situation. A recent graduate with savings and a clear preference for an academic grounding before full-time classroom responsibility often gravitates toward a traditional PGCE. Someone who needs an income from day one — perhaps because they have dependants, existing financial commitments, or simply don't want to take on further study debt — is usually better matched to a salaried School Direct place or Teach First, both of which pay a genuine salary rather than requiring you to fund a further year of study.

Teach First specifically suits people who are drawn to its explicit mission focus: every Teach First placement is in a school serving a disadvantaged community, and the programme is built around leadership development as much as classroom technique, with an expectation that many participants go on to take leadership roles relatively early in their careers, inside or outside the classroom. It isn't the right fit for someone who wants to choose freely which type of school or area they train in, since school placement is a core, non-negotiable part of the programme's design.

The assessment-only route suits a genuinely narrow group: people who have already been working as an unqualified or instructor-grade teacher for a substantial period and can point to a strong, evidenced track record against the Teachers' Standards without needing further structured training. It is not a shortcut for someone new to the classroom, and providers apply eligibility criteria strictly — see our dedicated assessment-only route guide for exactly who qualifies.

The overseas-trained teacher route suits exactly one group: teachers who already hold a recognised teaching qualification from outside the UK and want it recognised for employment in English state schools. It isn't a training route in the conventional sense so much as a recognition and assessment process — our overseas QTS guide covers exactly how that works and what changed from August 2025.

If none of these descriptions feels like a clean match — for example, you're changing career in your late thirties with a mortgage and a family to support, or you're not sure your degree subject is close enough to what you want to teach — our career changer route finder works through exactly those less straightforward scenarios in detail.

Funding: bursaries, salaries and student loans

Money is very often the single biggest factor in choosing a route, and it's also the area that changes most year to year, so it deserves particular care rather than relying on out-of-date figures you might have seen quoted elsewhere. Broadly, funding for teacher training falls into three different mechanisms, and it's worth understanding the distinction between all three before looking at any specific number.

A bursary or scholarship is a cash payment made to trainees on certain fee-funded routes, in certain subjects, to encourage recruitment into subjects where the government wants more teachers. Bursaries are typically non-repayable — if you complete your training and go on to teach, you simply keep the money, and importantly, if you don't finish training or decide not to go into teaching afterwards, you generally don't have to repay it either. This is a commonly misunderstood point worth stating clearly: a bursary is not a loan with conditions attached, unlike a tuition fee loan.

A salary on a salaried School Direct place or a Teach First placement is a completely different thing from a bursary — it's ordinary employment income, paid because you are legally employed by the school (or Teach First, in Teach First's case) as a trainee teacher from day one, doing real teaching work under supervision. It's taxed as normal income, and there's obviously nothing to repay because it was payment for work performed, not a training incentive.

A student loan applies to most trainees on a fee-funded, university-led PGCE, who fund their tuition and living costs through the standard student finance system — a tuition fee loan plus a means-tested maintenance loan — in exactly the same way as any other postgraduate course. Many current trainees now repay under Plan 5 terms, with a £25,000 repayment threshold and a 40-year loan term, which is a meaningfully different repayment profile from older student loan plans. If you're weighing up a fee-funded PGCE against a salaried School Direct place partly on financial grounds, it's worth running your likely numbers through our take-home pay calculator to see the real net difference once loan repayments are accounted for.

Entry requirements almost everyone needs

Whichever route you choose, a small set of entry requirements apply almost universally across teacher training in England, and it's worth checking these early rather than discovering a gap late in an application cycle.

• ✓ A degree (a 2:2 or above is the practical norm most providers look for, though some will consider a wider range of circumstances)
• ✓ GCSE grade 4/C or above (or an accepted equivalent) in English and maths for all routes, and in science as well if you want to teach primary
• ✓ For secondary applicants, a degree in or closely related to your intended teaching subject — though subject knowledge enhancement courses exist to help bridge a genuine gap
• ✓ A satisfactory Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check, since the role involves working with children
• ✓ Evidence of recent classroom experience or observation is very strongly recommended (rarely a hard legal requirement, but it materially strengthens most applications and interviews)
• ✓ Successful completion of a values and professional behaviours-style interview assessment, which most providers now run as a standard part of selection

None of these requirements differ meaningfully based on which of the five routes you choose — they sit above and apply across all of them, because they're ultimately about eligibility to train toward QTS at all, not about a specific provider's own preferences.

Career changers and older applicants

A significant and growing proportion of people training to teach each year are not recent graduates at all — they're career changers moving from a first career in industry, the armed forces, another public sector role, or from raising a family, often in their thirties, forties or beyond. There is no upper age limit for training to teach in England, and providers generally value the maturity, subject-matter depth and transferable professional skills that career changers bring to a training cohort.

The practical questions that matter most for career changers are usually financial rather than eligibility-based: can you afford a lower income during a training year (relevant if you're considering a fee-funded PGCE rather than a salaried route), how your existing mortgage or family commitments interact with training-year finances, and whether your specific previous career gives you a genuine subject-knowledge head start or a gap that needs bridging first. Our career changer route finder works through exactly these scenarios with worked examples rather than generic advice.

A simple decision framework if you're still unsure

If you've read the sections above and still aren't sure which route fits, it can help to work through your decision as a short sequence of questions rather than trying to weigh everything at once. Start with income: can you genuinely afford a training year without a salary, once rent, bills and any dependants are accounted for? If the honest answer is no, that alone narrows you toward a salaried School Direct place or Teach First, since both pay a wage from day one, and away from a standard fee-funded PGCE regardless of how appealing its academic structure sounds.

If income isn't the deciding constraint, the next question is about learning style and support structure. Do you want a cohort of fellow trainees to learn alongside, structured taught sessions on pedagogy, and a university's academic support network behind you through a difficult year? That points toward a traditional PGCE. Do you instead prefer to be embedded in one school's staff community from the outset, learning primarily through doing rather than through separate taught sessions? That points toward School Direct. And if what draws you in is specifically the idea of working in a school serving a disadvantaged community with a structured leadership development track running alongside your teacher training, Teach First is worth researching in detail rather than treating as interchangeable with the other two.

Finally, consider subject and phase. Shortage subjects at secondary level — physics, chemistry, computing and languages have all featured prominently in recent years — tend to have wider availability across every route, including strong salaried School Direct and Teach First options, simply because more schools and training partnerships exist to recruit into them. A less oversubscribed primary place, by contrast, may have a narrower spread of salaried options available in any given area, which can tip the practical decision toward whichever route actually has a place open near you, rather than your first choice in the abstract.

What day-to-day training actually looks like

It's worth setting expectations properly here, since prospective trainees are sometimes surprised by how intensive a training year actually is, regardless of which route they choose. A typical week during a school placement involves teaching or co-teaching a substantial timetable, planning lessons (often for multiple classes across different year groups), marking and assessing pupil work, attending staff meetings and INSET sessions, and — for PGCE and fee-funded School Direct trainees specifically — completing academic assignments and building a portfolio of evidence against the Teachers' Standards for university or provider assessment.

Workload during a training year is genuinely demanding, and this is one of the most consistent pieces of feedback from people who've been through any of these routes: expect long hours, particularly in the run-up to formal lesson observations and portfolio submission deadlines, and expect the intensity to ease somewhat once you're qualified and settled into your first post, even though teaching workload generally remains a real and widely discussed feature of the profession. None of the five routes described on this page is meaningfully "easier" in terms of workload than the others — the difference is in how that workload is structured and supported, not in its overall volume.

Support structures do differ meaningfully, though. University-led PGCE trainees typically have a named university tutor as well as a school-based mentor, giving two separate channels of support and, sometimes, two different perspectives on the same lesson or issue. School Direct trainees usually have a single, more consistently present in-school mentor, with university input where the school partners with one for the PGCE element. Teach First trainees have both a school-based mentor and a dedicated Teach First staff contact supporting the leadership development strand specifically, reflecting the programme's dual focus on classroom competence and leadership growth running in parallel throughout the two-year programme.

Explore each route in depth

Use the cards below to go deeper into whichever part of the decision matters most to you right now — a detailed route-by-route comparison, the full current funding picture, or the two more specialised routes covered in their own dedicated guides.