Teacher Training Bursaries & Scholarships Explained (2026/27)

Few areas of teacher training generate more confusion, and more out-of-date information circulating online, than bursaries. Figures quoted in a two-year-old blog post or forum thread are routinely wrong for the current cycle, because the Department for Education revises bursary subjects and amounts most years, sometimes substantially. This guide takes a deliberately different approach from most: rather than quoting numbers likely to be stale within months, it explains exactly how the system works, walks through the real, confirmed 2026/27 cuts story, and tells you precisely where to find this year's genuine, live figures.

What a bursary actually is

A teacher training bursary is a cash payment made directly to trainees on certain initial teacher training (ITT) routes, funded and set by the Department for Education, intended specifically to influence subject choice among people already planning to train as teachers. It exists because teacher supply doesn't naturally balance itself across subjects — physics, chemistry and computing have historically struggled to recruit enough trainees relative to demand, while some other subjects have generally found it easier — so the bursary system is used as a lever to nudge more people toward the subjects where shortages are most acute.

Crucially, a bursary is paid to you as a trainee on a fee-funded route — meaning you are not otherwise being paid a salary for training, unlike a salaried School Direct or Teach First place. It sits alongside, not instead of, the standard student finance system: you can generally still take out a tuition fee loan and maintenance loan for your PGCE or fee-funded School Direct year, with the bursary as an additional, non-repayable payment on top, where your subject currently attracts one.

The amount, and which subjects qualify at all, is set annually by the DfE ahead of each recruitment cycle, based on that year's assessment of where recruitment shortfalls are most severe. This is precisely why last year's figure for your subject is not a reliable guide to this year's — the whole system is explicitly designed to move year to year in response to recruitment data, not to stay fixed.

Bursary vs scholarship vs salary

These three terms get used loosely and interchangeably in casual conversation about teacher training funding, but they're genuinely different mechanisms with different implications for your finances.

Understanding this distinction matters most when comparing routes financially: don't assume a fee-funded route with a large bursary automatically beats a salaried route on income, or vice versa — the actual comparison depends on the specific bursary amount currently on offer for your subject versus the specific salary a School Direct or Teach First place would pay, which varies by school and region. Run your own numbers through the take-home pay calculator once you have real figures for both options in front of you, rather than guessing which route is more generous.

The 2026/27 cuts: what's actually changing

Here's the genuinely current, dated news story behind this page, and it's worth stating plainly rather than burying it: the Department for Education has confirmed that initial teacher training financial incentives are being reduced or removed across a number of subjects for the 2026/27 recruitment cycle. According to reporting from Tes, this affects eight subjects in total, with several — including English, art, music and religious education — reported to be losing their bursary entirely rather than simply seeing a reduced amount.

This is a meaningful shift from the pattern of recent years, where bursary levels for most subjects have typically moved up or down modestly year to year rather than being removed altogether. A subject losing its bursary entirely doesn't mean training in that subject has been discontinued or restricted in any way — the training routes, provider capacity and entry requirements for English, art, music and RE remain unaffected. What changes is purely the financial incentive layer: fee-funded trainees in an affected subject will, from 2026/27, need to fund their training year through the standard student finance system alone, without a bursary supplementing it, unless they choose a salaried route instead.

It's worth being precise about what we do and don't know with confidence here. The direction of travel — a genuine reduction in bursary generosity and coverage for 2026/27 — is well-established and citable. What we deliberately haven't done on this page is state a specific replacement cash figure for any subject, current or reduced, because exact amounts are set by the DfE, published on the official Get Into Teaching bursaries page, and can be subject to further in-year revision. Any specific number quoted in a general guide like this one risks being stale within months — treat the trend as the reliable takeaway, and the official page as the source for the number itself.

Why bursaries vary so much by subject

The underlying logic behind subject-by-subject bursary variation is straightforward even if the specific numbers shift yearly: subjects where the DfE's own recruitment modelling shows the biggest gap between the number of teachers needed and the number of trainees coming through tend to attract the largest incentives, while subjects that have generally recruited more comfortably tend to attract smaller incentives or, as with the 2026/27 changes, none at all in a given year.

This is also why the list of "shortage subjects" isn't static over the long run. A subject that struggled to recruit heavily a decade ago can see recruitment improve over time (sometimes partly because of a sustained period of generous bursary funding actually working as intended), while a different subject can see recruitment pressures emerge or worsen due to factors like broader graduate labour market competition for STEM-qualified candidates, or demographic shifts in pupil numbers by key stage. Physics and computing have persistently featured among the more heavily incentivised subjects in recent years for exactly this reason, reflecting strong competing graduate demand from industry.

• • Subjects with strong competing graduate career options outside teaching (e.g. physics, computing) have historically needed larger incentives to recruit competitively
• • Subjects that have recruited more comfortably in recent cycles are more likely to see incentives reduced or removed, as has now happened for several subjects in 2026/27
• • Bursary decisions are reset and reassessed by the DfE each year based on the latest recruitment data, not fixed permanently by subject
• • The same subject can move between "well-funded" and "reduced or no bursary" across different years depending on how recruitment for that subject has actually gone

Do you have to pay a bursary back?

No — and this is one of the most persistently misunderstood points about teacher training funding, worth stating unambiguously. Bursaries and scholarships for initial teacher training are, in the standard case, non-repayable. This holds in both of the two scenarios people most often worry about:

• ✓ If you start training and leave before completing the course, you generally do not have to repay the bursary you've already received.
• ✓ If you complete your training successfully but decide not to go on to teach — perhaps you change your mind, or a different opportunity comes up — you generally still do not have to repay it.

This is fundamentally different from how a tuition fee loan works, which is why it's worth keeping the two concepts firmly separate in your own planning. A tuition fee loan, taken out through the standard student finance system for a fee-funded PGCE or fee-funded School Direct place, is repaid through the ordinary student loan repayment system regardless of whether you go on to teach — exactly as it would be for a loan taken out for any other postgraduate qualification. Many current trainees now repay under Plan 5 terms, with a £25,000 income threshold before repayments start and a 40-year loan term. That obligation exists independently of your bursary, and isn't affected by whether your bursary was later reduced, removed, or paid in full.

A training salary on a salaried route obviously isn't repayable either, for the more straightforward reason that it was payment for real work you actually did as an employed trainee teacher, not a conditional incentive.

How to check this year's real figures

Given how much bursary figures move year to year, and given the genuine 2026/27 cuts described above, treat any specific number you encounter — including anywhere on this site — with appropriate caution unless it's dated to the exact current recruitment cycle. The reliable way to check is straightforward.

• • Go directly to the official Get Into Teaching bursaries page on gov.uk, which is updated by the DfE as the authoritative source for current-cycle figures.
• • Check the figure specifically for your intended subject and route (fee-funded PGCE, fee-funded School Direct, salaried School Direct, or Teach First) — don't assume figures are consistent across routes even within the same subject.
• • Cross-check with your specific training provider or school, since they'll confirm exactly what applies to the actual place they're offering you.
• • Re-check shortly before accepting any offer, particularly if you researched routes several months earlier in the cycle, since in-year revisions have happened previously.

Why the DfE uses bursaries as a policy lever at all

It's worth stepping back briefly to understand why a bursary system exists in the first place, because it makes the 2026/27 cuts easier to interpret sensibly rather than as an isolated, alarming headline. Teacher supply planning is fundamentally a forecasting exercise: the DfE estimates how many new teachers will be needed in each subject over the coming years, based on pupil number projections, expected retirements and departures from the profession, and how well recent recruitment cycles have performed against target. Where a subject is falling short of what's needed, a larger financial incentive is one of the more direct levers available to central government to influence individual career decisions, alongside broader efforts like marketing campaigns and improved routes into the profession for career changers.

This is also why bursary policy tends to move in cycles rather than trending consistently in one direction over many years. A subject can receive a large bursary for several consecutive years, see recruitment genuinely improve as a result, and then see its bursary reduced precisely because the policy appears to have worked and the recruitment gap has narrowed. Conversely, a subject with a reduced or removed bursary can see recruitment dip in response, prompting a reintroduced or increased incentive in a subsequent year. None of this is predictable with certainty from outside the DfE's own modelling, which is exactly why this page avoids speculating about what might happen in 2027/28 or beyond, and focuses instead on the confirmed 2026/27 position.

Overall government spending pressures also play a role in any given year's bursary decisions, alongside pure recruitment-gap modelling — a tighter fiscal environment can lead to incentives being trimmed even in subjects where recruitment hasn't dramatically improved, simply because there's less budget available for financial incentives across the whole ITT system in that particular spending review period. This is a plausible contributing factor behind any given year's cuts, including 2026/27's, though the DfE's own published rationale for the specific subject list is the definitive explanation rather than any single external commentator's theory.

Common myths about bursaries, debunked

A handful of persistent misunderstandings circulate about how bursaries work, some of which can lead to poor financial planning if taken at face value. It's worth addressing the most common directly.

• ✕ "If my subject loses its bursary, I can no longer train to teach it." Not true — a bursary cut is a funding change, not an eligibility or course-availability change. You can still train in any subject regardless of its current bursary status.
• ✕ "A bursary is basically a loan I'll have to pay back through my salary once I'm teaching." Not true — bursaries are non-repayable in the standard case, unlike a tuition fee loan, which is repaid through the separate student loan system regardless of your bursary.
• ✕ "Every teacher training route comes with a bursary if I pick the right subject." Not true — salaried routes (salaried School Direct, Teach First) don't carry a separate bursary at all, since you're already being paid a wage; bursaries apply specifically to fee-funded places.
• ✕ "This year's advertised bursary figure is guaranteed for the whole recruitment cycle." Not always safe to assume — figures are generally confirmed for a cycle once published, but it's still worth checking the live official page close to when you actually accept an offer, since exceptional in-year revisions have occurred previously.

What this means for your route choice

If you're weighing up routes and your intended subject is one of those affected by the 2026/27 cuts, it's worth treating that as one input into your decision rather than the only one. A reduced or removed bursary makes a salaried route (School Direct salaried, or Teach First) relatively more financially attractive if income during training matters a great deal to your situation, since neither of those routes was ever dependent on bursary funding in the first place. It doesn't change your underlying eligibility, the quality of training available, or your career prospects once qualified — see our full PGCE vs School Direct vs Teach First comparison for the complete picture on choosing between routes, and our career changer route finder if your financial circumstances as an older applicant make the income question especially important.

Whichever route and funding arrangement you end up on, it's worth modelling your likely finances properly rather than relying on headline bursary or salary figures alone. Run your expected income — bursary plus any part-time work, or a training salary — through our take-home pay calculator to see a realistic monthly picture once tax, National Insurance and (where applicable) student loan repayments are accounted for.

It's also worth building a small amount of contingency into your planning regardless of which funding arrangement you're relying on. Training years are demanding, and unplanned costs do come up — travel between placement schools that turns out to be more expensive than expected, resources you choose to buy for your own classroom practice, or simply a slower-than-expected first payment if your bursary or salary's exact start date shifts slightly against your own budgeting assumptions. None of this is specific to teacher training particularly, but it's easy to plan a training year's finances around a single headline number and then find the actual cash flow less smooth than the number alone suggested, especially in the first month or two before payments settle into a predictable monthly rhythm.

Finally, remember that a bursary or scholarship decision for any given subject is specific to that recruitment cycle, and it sits alongside, rather than replaces, the two other routes into any given subject that don't depend on bursary funding at all. If English, art, music or RE is genuinely the subject you want to teach, a reduced or removed bursary for 2026/27 is a real financial factor to weigh, but it isn't a signal to abandon the subject or the profession — a salaried School Direct place or Teach First placement in that same subject remains funded exactly as it always was, on the strength of the employing school's own budget rather than a central DfE incentive payment.