Design & Technology Bursary & Pay Support (2026/27)

Design and technology does not fit neatly into either of the two stories that dominate coverage of teacher training funding. It is not one of the four subjects — chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics — that sit on the top £29,000 bursary tier with a subject-body scholarship attached. But it is also not one of the subjects that lost its bursary altogether for 2026/27, as English, music, art and design and religious education did. It occupies a middle position that gets far less attention than either extreme, and that middle position has just become materially worse: a £6,000 cut to the bursary, landing the year after the subject recorded its best postgraduate recruitment numbers in over a decade.

This page sets out what is genuinely distinctive about training to teach design and technology: the funding cut and the volatile history behind it, the unusually wide range of degrees that qualify you to train, the Subject Knowledge Enhancement route that exists specifically for people moving in from engineering or design careers, and the demand-side problem — a shrinking subject footprint in schools — that sits alongside the recruitment shortfall and makes this a different kind of shortage subject to plan around.

Why design and technology is a different case

Most guidance about "shortage subject" bursaries treats the funded subjects as a single block, because the headline structure — a bursary, sometimes a scholarship, sometimes a retention incentive — looks similar from subject to subject. Design and technology breaks that pattern in three ways at once.

First, its bursary has been the least stable of any subject still receiving one. Where chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics have held at £29,000 (previously £27,000 to £30,000) for several consecutive cycles, design and technology's bursary was scrapped entirely for 2021/22, rebuilt gradually to £20,000 by 2023/24, rose again to £25,000 and then £26,000 over the following two years, and has now been cut back down to £20,000 for 2026/27. No other currently-funded subject has moved through that many distinct funding levels in five years.

Second, it has never had a subject-body scholarship. Chemistry has the Royal Society of Chemistry, computing has BCS, physics has the Institute of Physics, and French, German and Spanish each have one too. Design and technology's professional body, the Design and Technology Association, funds CPD, resources and its own advocacy campaigns, but there is no DfE-backed scholarship channelling extra money and mentoring to design and technology trainees the way there is for those four subjects.

Third, and most importantly for anyone weighing up the subject's long-term prospects, design and technology is shrinking as a subject in schools at the same time as it struggles to recruit teachers. Physics and computing, by contrast, both have stable or growing pupil demand — physics is compulsory science content and computing is a compulsory national curriculum subject with rising GCSE entries. Design and technology's GCSE entries have fallen for well over a decade. That combination of a contracting subject and a persistently under-recruited teaching workforce is not one this site's other shortage-subject guides need to grapple with, and it is covered in full later on this page.

The £20,000 bursary, and why it fell from £26,000

For trainees starting postgraduate design and technology courses in September 2026, the DfE bursary is £20,000, tax free, paid by your training provider in monthly instalments once you are on an eligible fee-funded course leading to QTS. It sits alongside languages other than French, German and Spanish at the same £20,000 rate, one tier below chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics at £29,000, and one tier above biology and geography, which were cut far more sharply to just £5,000 for the same year.

What makes this figure worth dwelling on is the trajectory that produced it. The table below sets out the postgraduate design and technology bursary across the years we were able to verify directly against the DfE's own published funding guidance for each academic year.

The DfE's general explanation for the 2026/27 reductions, given across several subjects at once rather than specifically about design and technology, was that incentive funding should track the recruitment and retention pipeline: with more trainees and more teachers already in schools than the year before, the department judged that some of the incentive spending could be reduced. Biology and geography absorbed by far the largest cuts, falling from £26,000 to £5,000. French, German and Spanish fell by the same £6,000 as design and technology, from £26,000 to £20,000. Chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics were untouched.

No scholarship — and the case being made for one

Four subjects currently carry a DfE-funded scholarship on top of the standard bursary route: chemistry, computing and physics at £31,000 each, run respectively by the Royal Society of Chemistry, BCS and the Institute of Physics, and French, German and Spanish at £22,000, run by the British Council. Design and technology has none of this, and never has.

The Design and Technology Association's advocacy is worth knowing about even though it has not yet produced a scholarship, because it tells you how the sector itself frames the funding gap. In its 2023 "Reimagining Design and Technology" vision paper, developed from consultations with teachers in nine English cities, the Association argued for the ITT bursary to be brought into line with other STEM subjects and for specific incentives to draw people with engineering, product design and manufacturing backgrounds into teaching. The organisation has also pointed out that a lower bursary tier works against the subject in a very direct way: graduates in engineering, physics or another STEM discipline who might otherwise consider teaching design and technology have a financial incentive to train into a £29,000-bursary subject instead, even where their skills and interests would suit D&T equally well.

None of that campaigning has changed the funding position for 2026/27, and there is no indication of a scholarship being introduced for a future cycle either. If you are choosing design and technology, it is worth doing so on the basis of the subject and the classroom, not on an expectation that a scholarship route might appear — the evidence over the last several cycles points the other way, towards the bursary itself moving up and down rather than a new funding channel being added.

Eligibility: the widest degree net of any bursary subject

Here is where design and technology genuinely stands out, and in a way that should matter a great deal if you are reading this as a career changer rather than a recent graduate. The general DfE bursary rule applies as it does for every subject: you need a first, 2:1, 2:2, master's or PhD-level qualification, and — for 2026/27 — you must be entitled to support under the student finance criteria, since design and technology is not one of the two subjects (physics and languages) carrying an exception to that rule. None of that is unusual.

What is unusual is the subject-match requirement, or rather the near-absence of one. Get Into Teaching's own guidance states plainly that you need a bachelor's degree in any subject to train to teach design and technology, with relevant A-levels used to demonstrate your subject knowledge where your degree is not directly related. Training providers report successful applications from graduates in fine art, product design, fashion design, architecture and nutrition, alongside the more obviously related engineering and technology degrees. One SCITT's own published entry guidance lists engineering, 3D design, electronic engineering, product design, food technology, textiles, architecture, fashion and surface pattern design, and systems and control as the kinds of first degree it regularly accepts.

• Design-related creative and technical degrees. Product design, industrial design, 3D design, architecture, fashion and textiles design, and graphic or communication design are all commonly accepted first degrees for D&T training.
• Engineering degrees of almost any specialism. Mechanical, electronic, civil, automotive and general engineering graduates are routinely accepted, reflecting how much of the design and technology curriculum — systems and control, resistant materials, CAD/CAM — overlaps with engineering training.
• Food-related degrees. Food technology, food science and nutrition graduates are accepted for the food and nutrition strand of the subject, which many providers treat as a distinct specialism within D&T.
• Fine art and unrelated creative degrees, in some cases. Get Into Teaching's own guidance does not require your degree subject to match design and technology at all, which is why fine art and other creative-but-unrelated degrees have led to successful training applications.

Compare that with physics or computing, where providers generally expect a closely related first degree — maths, engineering or natural sciences for physics; software engineering or information systems for computing — and treat anything further afield as needing a formal bridging course before an application is even considered. Design and technology's providers are working from a wider starting assumption: that industry experience and a portfolio of practical design or making work can substitute for an exact degree match in a way that is much harder to argue for in physics.

Subject knowledge enhancement: the bridge from industry

Because design and technology recruits so many trainees whose first degree is not itself design and technology, Subject Knowledge Enhancement (SKE) courses play a bigger practical role in this subject than in most others. An SKE is a pre-ITT programme intended to fill specific gaps in your subject knowledge before you start formal teacher training, and providers typically suggest one in a fairly narrow set of circumstances.

• You hold an A-level in a design and technology-related subject but your degree is in an unrelated field.
• You have developed relevant subject knowledge through workplace experience — for example, several years as a design engineer or in manufacturing — rather than through formal study.
• You have had a substantial break from studying or practising your specialist area and need to refresh it before training.

In practice, the amount of SKE you need is usually assessed at your training provider interview rather than fixed in advance from your application form, and it can be a meaningful commitment — one SCITT's published guidance describes a course requiring the equivalent of 25 hours a week of study, with some elements delivered face to face away from your local area. That is not a token add-on; it is a genuine extension of your route into training, and it needs to be planned for rather than discovered late.

The practical implication for anyone coming from an engineering, manufacturing or design career is to raise the SKE question directly and early, ideally before you commit to an application cycle. Asking your prospective provider at the outset whether they expect you to need SKE, and how long that would add to your timeline, avoids a scenario where you have already planned a September start only to discover a preparatory course needs to happen first.

How to apply, and what to check first

Because there is no scholarship to apply for separately, the application process for design and technology is simpler than for chemistry, computing or physics — there is only one route to secure, not two running in parallel.

A subject in decline, not just a shortage

Every other shortage-subject guide on this site describes a supply problem: schools need more teachers of a subject that pupils keep wanting to study. Design and technology is different, because the subject itself has been contracting in English schools for a long time, and that contraction is a large part of the context you are training into.

Education Policy Institute research published in March 2022 found that GCSE entries in design and technology had roughly halved over the preceding decade: 280,670 pupils took the subject in 2009, representing 44% of the cohort, against 136,150 in 2020, representing 22%. Over almost exactly the same period, the number of design and technology teachers in English schools fell from around 14,800 in 2011 to about 7,300 in 2020 — also roughly a halving. The same research found that converter academies and local-authority-maintained schools retained higher D&T take-up than sponsored academies and free schools, and identified accountability measures such as the English Baccalaureate, alongside curriculum and qualification reform and school capital constraints on workshop and kitchen facilities, as contributing causes.

The more recent picture is one of stabilisation rather than continued collapse. Ofqual's 2025 GCSE results data puts design and technology entries at around 137,000, essentially flat against the previous year and broadly in line with the 2020 figure above — which suggests the sharpest phase of the decline had already played out by 2020, and entries have levelled off since rather than continuing to fall at the same rate. That is a genuinely different trajectory from the 2004 figure of over 400,000 entries sometimes cited by the Design and Technology Association, which frames the scale of the long-run decline but predates the plateau visible in the more recent data.

The Design and Technology Association's July 2023 "Reimagining Design and Technology" report, and its 2024 follow-up manifesto for change, both argue that the subject needs deliberate curriculum investment — protected training budgets, updated qualifications and a reformed public case for the subject — to avoid the decline resuming. Whether that investment materialises is a policy question outside the scope of this page, but the practical point for a prospective trainee is straightforward: you are training into a subject whose place in the curriculum is being actively argued over, not one whose long-term position in schools can be assumed as settled.

What the 2025/26 recruitment numbers show

Set against that demand-side backdrop, the DfE's Initial Teacher Training Census for 2025/26 recorded a genuine improvement in design and technology recruitment. The subject had 680 new postgraduate entrants, the highest figure since comparable statistics began in 2012/13, against a target it still missed by around 30 percentage points — reaching approximately 70% of target. Design and technology was one of ten out of eighteen secondary subjects to miss its postgraduate target in that census, alongside subjects including business studies, drama and religious education, which have a similar long-run pattern of under-recruitment.

We want to be precise about what we can and cannot verify here. The 70% figure and the 680 entrant count are consistently reported across the DfE's own release and contemporary press coverage of it, including Tes's reporting on the December 2025 census. We were not able to independently verify a precise percentage for the year before, 2024/25, from a primary source we are confident in — commentary around the subject describes recruitment as having been below 50% of target in most years since at least 2015/16, and Education Policy Institute-adjacent reporting from 2022 describes the government meeting "less than a quarter" of its recruitment target for the subject in an unspecified recent year, but we have not stated either of those as an exact 2024/25 figure because we could not confirm one to our own standard.

What we can say with confidence is the shape of the story: design and technology has missed its recruitment target every year for which we found published data, by a wide margin in most of them, and 2025/26 represents the best single year on record even though it still fell short. That mirrors the pattern seen in physics and computing over the same census — both subjects also posted their best recruitment in years while still missing target — but design and technology's starting point was worse and its funding tier is lower, which is why the improvement has attracted much less attention.

Why D&T isn't on the Targeted Retention Incentive list

Once you are qualified and teaching, the Targeted Retention Incentive is worth between £3,000 and £6,000 a year to early-career teachers of an eligible subject in an eligible state-funded secondary or special school. Design and technology is not one of the eligible subjects. The scheme covers exactly four: chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics — the same four subjects that sit on the top £29,000 bursary tier and carry a scholarship. Design and technology, despite recruiting well below target for over a decade, has never been added to the list.

The separate further education Targeted Retention Incentive, which applies to FE teachers rather than school teachers, covers seven priority areas: building and construction, chemistry, computing and digital technology, early years education, engineering and manufacturing, mathematics and physics. Design and technology is not named there either, though a design and technology graduate teaching on an engineering or manufacturing-related FE course might fall under that adjacent category depending on the specific qualification involved — that is a question worth checking against the FE scheme's own subject area definitions rather than assuming from the subject name alone.

For a secondary school design and technology teacher, the practical consequence is that the discretionary layer of the pay system — recruitment and retention payments made at school level under the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document — is the only lever available, rather than a guaranteed national scheme. Our full Targeted Retention Incentive guide sets out exactly how the four-subject scheme works and why it has stayed narrow despite repeated calls to widen it, and our guide to STPCD recruitment and retention payments covers the discretionary mechanism that design and technology teachers are left to rely on instead.

What design and technology teaching pays once you qualify

Design and technology teachers are paid on exactly the same Main Pay Range and Upper Pay Range as every other classroom teacher in England. There is no subject uplift in the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document, and a design and technology teacher and a history teacher on the same pay point in the same school are paid identically. Our 2026/27 teacher pay scales page has the full ranges.

With no Targeted Retention Incentive available, the two things that can genuinely move a design and technology teacher's pay above the standard scale are school-level rather than national:

• STPCD recruitment and retention payments. Schools can use their discretionary powers under the pay document to make additional payments to recruit or retain a teacher in a hard-to-fill post, and a subject that has missed its national recruitment target for over a decade is a reasonable case to make. This is negotiated and school-specific rather than automatic, so it needs to be raised at offer stage.
• TLR responsibility. Design and technology departments are often small, sometimes only one or two specialists covering several material areas — resistant materials, food, textiles, electronics. That can mean earlier access to a Teaching and Learning Responsibility payment for running the department than you might see in a larger subject area, simply because there are fewer people to share the responsibility with.

Beyond those two levers, the financial planning that matters most is around the training year itself rather than the teaching salary that follows it. A £20,000 bursary paid in monthly instalments from early October, with no payment for the first month of the course, is a real budgeting constraint — and for anyone coming from an engineering or design industry salary, the step down to a training bursary and then to an ECT salary is likely to be substantial. Running the actual figures through our take-home pay calculator before you commit is worth doing properly, particularly if you are also weighing the cost and time of an SKE course against your current income. Our guide to PGCE, School Direct and Teach First routes is also worth reading alongside this page if a salaried route — which carries no bursary but pays a wage during training — might suit a career change into design and technology better than a fee-funded course would.

Sources, and what we could not verify

Bursary figures for 2023/24 (£20,000), 2024/25 (£25,000), 2025/26 (£26,000) and 2026/27 (£20,000) are taken directly from the DfE's own Funding: initial teacher training (ITT) guidance for each respective academic year on GOV.UK, and the scholarship subjects and amounts for 2026/27 are from the same source and from the Initial teacher training bursary funding manual: 2026 to 2027 academic year. The 2021/22 removal of the design and technology bursary, alongside eight other subjects, is from Schools Week's reporting of 13 October 2020. The degree classification threshold (1st, 2:1, 2:2, master's or PhD) and the general student finance eligibility rule are from the same DfE guidance.

The claim that a bachelor's degree in any subject is sufficient to train to teach design and technology, with A-levels used to evidence subject knowledge otherwise, is from Get Into Teaching's own design and technology subject page. The list of specific accepted related degrees — including engineering, product design, food technology, textiles, architecture and fashion — and the description of Subject Knowledge Enhancement circumstances and workload, are drawn from published training provider entry guidance, including Cornwall SCITT's design and technology course page, and are consistent with the pattern described across several other providers' published entry requirements. The Design and Technology Association's advocacy for bursary parity with STEM subjects and its support for industry entrants is from its July 2023 "Reimagining Design and Technology" vision paper and its 2024 manifesto for change.

GCSE entry and teacher workforce figures for 2009 to 2020 are from Education Policy Institute research published in March 2022 and reported by Schools Week on 23 March 2022. The 2025 GCSE entry figure and the description of a recent plateau are from Ofqual's published 2025 results data as reported in contemporaneous education press coverage. Recruitment figures for 2025/26 — 680 new entrants, the highest since 2012/13, and a target shortfall of around 30 percentage points — are from the DfE's Initial Teacher Training Census, academic year 2025/26, published 4 December 2025, and from Tes's reporting of the same release. One extraction of the same underlying census data returned an entrant figure of 688 rather than 680; the discrepancy is immaterial and we have used 680 throughout, as the figure given in Tes's direct reporting of the DfE release.

Figures in this area move every cycle, and design and technology's bursary has moved more than most subjects' over the last five years. Check the current funding guidance on GOV.UK and the Get Into Teaching bursaries page directly before making a financial decision. This is independent guidance for orientation, not financial or careers advice, and it is not affiliated with the Department for Education, the Design and Technology Association or any teaching union.