Maths Teacher Bursary & Pay Support (2026/27)

For years, the advice for anyone considering maths teacher training was simple and largely correct: a large bursary, a genuinely prestigious scholarship on top if you were selected, and a subject so short of specialists that recruitment adverts practically wrote themselves. Two of those three things are still true for 2026/27. The third has changed, and it changed for a reason that has nothing to do with how well maths is recruiting.

This page covers what actually happened to the maths scholarship, why the explanation matters more than the £2,000 it was worth, what the standard £29,000 bursary requires of you now, and what has happened to maths recruitment more broadly — because the subject's position on the DfE's own numbers has shifted more than most guidance has caught up with. It deliberately does not re-run the full bursary comparison table you can find on our bursaries and scholarships guide, or the full breakdown of every subject scholarship on our scholarships compared guide, which covers the same IMA story in the context of comparing all the subject bodies against each other. This page goes further on the maths-specific detail: what the loss actually costs you, what is still available in its place, and what the recruitment data means for how much leverage you walk into a job with.

The scholarship that disappeared

Until the 2025/26 cohort, mathematics sat alongside chemistry, computing and physics as a subject with both a DfE bursary and a subject-body scholarship layered on top of it. The Mathematics Teacher Training Scholarship was worth £31,000, funded by the Department for Education and delivered by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) in partnership with five other bodies: the London Mathematical Society, the Royal Statistical Society, Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI), the Mathematical Association, and STEM Learning. It ran under its own branding at teachingmathsscholars.org, and by all accounts operated exactly like its physics, chemistry and computing counterparts — a competitive application, a capped number of awards, and a support programme wrapped around the cash.

That changed for the 2026/27 cycle. Schools Week reported on 7 October 2025 that the DfE had cut or removed bursaries and scholarships across several subjects for 2026/27, and that among the changes, the maths scholarship had been axed. The reporting is specific about why, and the reason is unusual enough to be worth stating precisely rather than summarising: the department had wanted to continue offering a maths scholarship, but the IMA declined to extend its grant agreement to deliver it. The IMA's executive director, Rosalind Azouzi, gave this explanation on the record:

Azouzi added that the IMA remained fully committed to supporting the trainees already enrolled through 2025/26 — so nobody who had already been awarded a scholarship lost it. What ended was the next intake, not the current one.

The distinction between a funding decision and a delivery-partner decision is not a technicality here. It changes what the gap actually means for you. If the DfE had decided maths no longer merited a scholarship — on the same recruitment-tracks-funding logic it used to strip bursaries from English, music, art and design, and religious education for 2026/27 — that would tell you something about how the department currently rates maths as a priority. That is not what happened. The IMA is a small charity running several education programmes at once, and it made a capacity decision about its own organisation. The scholarship gap in maths is best read as an administrative casualty, not a verdict on the subject.

What the maths scholarship used to offer

It is worth being precise about what disappeared, because the cash was never really the point — as with every subject-body scholarship, £31,000 replaced the £29,000 bursary rather than sitting on top of it, so the direct financial loss to any individual trainee is £2,000 across a training year, or roughly £200 a month. What the scholarship carried beyond that was a support structure: complimentary membership of the partner mathematical societies, access to continuing professional development events run by people who write national maths curriculum and assessment guidance, and a network of fellow scholars and mathematics specialists spanning six different professional bodies rather than one. For a trainee placed in a school with a thin maths department, that breadth of institutional backing — spanning statistics, applied maths, maths education research and classroom practice — was arguably richer than any single-subject-body equivalent, IOP included.

None of that is available through the scholarship route for 2026/27, because there is no scholarship to apply for. What is available instead is covered later on this page, because it turns out to be more substantial than the "nothing" framing implies — maths has a second, older, larger DfE-funded CPD infrastructure that was never tied to the scholarship in the first place.

The £29,000 bursary for 2026/27

Strip away the scholarship question and the maths bursary itself is unchanged, and unremarkable in the sense that matters most: it sits exactly where it has sat for several cycles, on the DfE's top £29,000 funding tier alongside chemistry, computing and physics. The Department for Education's Initial teacher training bursary funding manual: 2026 to 2027 academic year confirms the figure directly, and its accompanying Funding initial teacher training (ITT): academic year 2026 to 2027 summary lists mathematics on the £29,000 postgraduate bursary row and, separately and explicitly, does not list mathematics anywhere on the scholarship table for that year.

The bursary is paid by your training provider, not by a separate scheme you apply to, in ten monthly instalments beginning in early October — which means, as with every bursary-funded subject, your first month of training is unpaid. It is available on eligible fee-funded (non-salaried) postgraduate courses leading to QTS in secondary mathematics in England, and on the salaried School Direct route the equivalent amount is paid as a training salary grant rather than a bursary, through the same eligibility gateway.

Put plainly: if you are training to teach maths starting in September 2026, your funding position is identical to a maths trainee from the year before, minus a route to an extra £2,000 and its attached support programme. It is a real loss, but a bounded one, and it leaves the core proposition — a large, tax-free training bursary with no separate application — completely intact.

Eligibility in full

Bursary eligibility for maths follows the general rule that applies across every DfE-funded ITT subject for 2026/27, with no subject-specific tightening or loosening in either direction. Two gates matter.

Your degree

You need a UK first degree or recognised equivalent classed at 2:2 (lower second class honours) or above, a master's degree, or a PhD. That is the same threshold used for chemistry, computing and physics bursaries. It is worth being explicit that this is a lower bar than the one attached to a scholarship — the BCS computing scholarship, for example, required a 2:1 or above for 2026-27 — but because maths has no scholarship for this cycle, that higher bar is simply not something a maths applicant needs to clear. The bursary's 2:2 threshold is the only one that applies.

Your degree does not need to be in mathematics itself for many providers to accept you onto a course, though requirements vary by provider and by how close your degree is to the subject. Physics, engineering, economics and other numerate degrees are commonly accepted, sometimes alongside a subject knowledge enhancement (SKE) course to bridge specific gaps before or during your training year. SKE funding is a separate stream from the bursary and worth investigating early if your degree is maths-adjacent rather than a maths degree, because it changes your timeline.

Student finance entitlement

You must be entitled to support under the UK student finance eligibility criteria, which in practice generally rules out bursary funding for trainees who are not UK or Irish nationals, or who do not otherwise qualify for home fee status. This is the general rule that applies to every subject by default. Physics and modern languages held a specific exception to it for overseas-trained applicants, dating from 2023, which the DfE narrowed from 5pm on 7 May 2026 — but that exception never applied to mathematics in the first place. There is no maths-specific student finance carve-out to lose, because there was never one to begin with. An overseas applicant training to teach maths has always needed to separately qualify for UK student finance support to receive the bursary, and that has not changed for 2026/27.

How to apply, and when

There is no separate bursary application to make, because there is no scholarship gatekeeping the process this cycle. The sequence for a 2026/27 maths trainee is simpler than it is for physics, chemistry or computing applicants weighing up whether to also apply for a scholarship window.

If a maths scholarship consortium does return in a future cycle, expect it to look like the current physics and computing schemes: a separate, competitive application on top of your training place, run by whichever body picks the scheme back up, with its own deadline that closes well before the academic year starts. There is nothing to apply for along those lines today.

The recruitment turnaround behind all this

The scholarship story only makes full sense next to what has happened to maths recruitment, because it explains why nobody in government seems to be treating the gap as an emergency. Mathematics has, on the DfE's own census, stopped being a subject in crisis.

In the Initial Teacher Training Census, academic year 2024/25, mathematics recorded 2,229 new postgraduate entrants against a target of 3,065 — 73% of target, despite a 24% increase in entrants on the year before. A year later, the Initial Teacher Training Census, academic year 2025/26, published 4 December 2025, recorded 2,628 new entrants against a target of 2,300 — 114% of target, and the first time mathematics has met its postgraduate recruitment target since 2011/12.

As with the equivalent swings in physics and computing recruitment, two things moved at once and both deserve stating rather than one being allowed to stand in for the whole story. Entrants genuinely rose, from 2,229 to 2,628, an 18% increase. But the target also fell sharply, from 3,065 to 2,300 — a reduction of roughly a quarter, part of a wider set of target cuts the DfE made across most secondary subjects for 2025/26 on the basis of improved supply forecasts. Had the 2024/25 target of 3,065 been held constant, 2,628 entrants would represent around 86% of target rather than 114% — a real improvement on 73%, but a much less dramatic one than the headline percentage alone suggests.

Chemistry moved in a similar direction over the same period, recruiting 120% of its 2025/26 target and exceeding it for the first time since 2014/15. Physics and computing, sharing the identical £29,000 bursary tier, did not: 78% and 81% of target respectively, both still short. That split is the clearest illustration available of why a funding structure built around four subjects treated as a single "shortage" block no longer describes any of them uniformly — two are missing target and two are not, and the scholarship landscape (chemistry and physics still offering one, maths now offering none, computing's BCS scheme continuing) does not track that recruitment split at all. The scholarship gap in maths is coincidental to the recruitment recovery, not caused by it or a reward for it.

The Targeted Retention Incentive and maths

Once you are qualified and teaching, maths sits on exactly the same additional-payments footing as chemistry, computing and physics: it is one of the four subjects eligible for the Targeted Retention Incentive, a Department for Education payment of £3,000 to £6,000 a year for early-career teachers in eligible state-funded secondary and special schools in England. Nothing about the payment bands, the pupil premium decile and Education Investment Area methodology, the non-pensionable tax treatment, or the claim process differs for a maths teacher compared with a physics or chemistry teacher — the mechanism is genuinely subject-blind once you clear the eligibility gates, and we cover all of that in detail in our full Targeted Retention Incentive guide rather than repeating it here.

What is worth flagging specifically for maths is the same tension the recruitment data raises elsewhere on this page: the incentive was built for four subjects in shortage, and on the 2025/26 census maths (114% of target) and chemistry (120%) are no longer among them, while physics (78%) and computing (81%) still are. That is not a reason to expect your own eligibility to change — the subject list has not moved, and nothing published suggests it is about to — but it is the same reason our targeted retention incentive guide flags the scheme's future continuation as an open question rather than a certainty, and a maths teacher relying on the payment for multi-year financial planning should read that caveat rather than assume automatic continuation.

CPD that doesn't need a scholarship

The instinctive read of "no scholarship" is "no subject-specific professional support," and for maths that read is wrong. Mathematics has two long-running, DfE-funded CPD infrastructures that were never tied to the ITT scholarship in the first place, are open to any maths teacher or trainee regardless of how they funded their training, and between them cover the whole span from early years to A-level.

• The Advanced Mathematics Support Programme (AMSP). Delivered by Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI) under a Department for Education contract running since 2018, the AMSP provides free continuing professional development, teaching resources and student enrichment for teachers of AS and A-level maths, further maths and Core Maths, alongside support for higher-tier GCSE maths teaching. It is aimed squarely at improving participation and provision in post-16 maths, which makes it most directly relevant if your timetable includes sixth-form teaching, but its CPD and resources are not gated behind any application or selection process.
• The National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) and the Maths Hubs network. The NCETM coordinates a DfE-funded network of regional Maths Hubs across England, delivering Teaching for Mastery professional development free to any state-funded school, from early years through to secondary. Since the programme began in 2015, more than 9,000 primary schools and 1,500 secondary schools have taken part in some form of the Maths Hubs CPD offer, which makes it one of the largest subject-specific professional development infrastructures in English education, let alone one specific to maths.

Neither programme replaces what a scholarship's peer network and professional body membership offered — the IMA consortium's mix of six mathematical societies was genuinely broad, and free society membership is not the same thing as free CPD. But in terms of the thing that actually determines whether a newly qualified maths teacher gets useful subject-specific development in their first few years, the AMSP and the Maths Hubs network are larger, longer-running and more embedded in the state school system than any ITT scholarship programme ever was. If the scholarship's disappearance is the thing you were worried about, this is the more useful thing to actually go and use.

What maths teaching actually pays

Once you are qualified, maths teachers are paid on exactly the same statutory pay ranges as every other classroom teacher in England. There is no maths premium in the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document, no subject-specific scale, and no automatic uplift for teaching a subject that happens to sit on a higher training bursary tier — a maths teacher and an English teacher on the same pay point in the same school are paid identically. Our 2026/27 teacher pay scales page has the full Main, Upper, Unqualified and Leadership ranges.

Two things sit alongside the pay scales rather than inside them, and both apply to maths exactly as they do to chemistry, computing and physics:

• The Targeted Retention Incentive, covered above, worth £3,000 to £6,000 a year to eligible early-career teachers in eligible schools — non-pensionable, and paid directly by the DfE rather than through your school.
• STPCD recruitment and retention payments. Schools have discretionary power under the pay document to make additional payments to recruit or retain a teacher. Shortage-subject status has traditionally been the textbook justification for using it, which is precisely why the recruitment turnaround covered earlier in this page matters for your negotiating position: a school recruiting a maths teacher in a market where maths is meeting its national training target has a weaker argument for treating you as scarce than a school recruiting a physics or computing teacher does right now. That does not mean the lever is unavailable, but it is a genuinely different conversation than it would have been five years ago.

That last point is worth taking seriously rather than glossing over, because a lot of circulating advice about maths teacher pay was written when the subject was still comfortably short and has not been updated to reflect 114% recruitment. Our guide to negotiating your starting pay point covers how to make a shortage-subject case properly where it still applies — but for maths specifically, the case now rests more on your individual strength as a candidate and your school's specific staffing gap than on a subject-wide scarcity argument, which is a meaningfully different pitch to walk into an offer conversation with.

One number worth modelling honestly before you commit to training: a £29,000 tax-free bursary, paid in ten monthly instalments from early October, is a generous training-year income by teacher training standards, but it is not the same shape as a salary, and the step down to your first ECT salary — taxed normally, and without the bursary's instalment gap — is worth running through our take-home pay calculator before your training year starts rather than after your first payslip as a qualified teacher arrives.

Sources, and what we could not verify

The 2026/27 bursary figure for mathematics, the absence of mathematics from the 2026/27 scholarship table, the general £29,000/£31,000/£22,000 bursary and scholarship structure across subjects, and the 2:2 degree classification and student finance eligibility rules are taken directly from the Department for Education's Initial teacher training bursary funding manual: 2026 to 2027 academic year and its accompanying Funding initial teacher training (ITT): academic year 2026 to 2027 summary, both on GOV.UK, cross-checked against Get Into Teaching's bursaries and scholarships page. The account of the Mathematics Teacher Training Scholarship ending — the IMA's decision not to extend its grant agreement, Rosalind Azouzi's statement, the department's stated intention to continue offering a maths scholarship, and the IMA's commitment to existing 2025/26 scholars — is from Schools Week's reporting of 7 October 2025 on the DfE's 2026/27 bursary and scholarship changes. The scholarship's prior structure and partner bodies (the London Mathematical Society, the Royal Statistical Society, Mathematics in Education and Industry, the Mathematical Association and STEM Learning) are from the IMA's and the scheme's own teachingmathsscholars.org pages describing the 2025/26 cohort.

Recruitment figures are from the DfE's Initial Teacher Training Census: the 2024/25 release for the 2,229 entrants, 73% of target and 3,065 target figure, and the 2025/26 release, published 4 December 2025, for the 2,628 entrants, 114% of target, 2,300 target, and the comparative chemistry, physics and computing percentages. The claim that 2025/26 was the first year mathematics met its postgraduate target since 2011/12, and the equivalent claim for chemistry since 2014/15, are drawn from DfE and sector reporting of that census. Targeted Retention Incentive details are from the DfE's guidance on targeted retention incentive payments for school teachers, covered in full on this site's dedicated guide. Advanced Mathematics Support Programme details — its 2018 start date, delivery by MEI under DfE contract, and its scope across A-level, further maths, Core Maths and higher-tier GCSE support — are from MEI's own published programme pages and from public procurement notices for the AMSP contract. NCETM and Maths Hubs details — DfE funding, delivery coordination, the Teaching for Mastery programme, and the more than 9,000 primary and 1,500 secondary schools engaged since 2015 — are from the NCETM's own published guidance and programme descriptions.

Figures in this area move every cycle, and the maths scholarship's disappearance shows they can also move for reasons that have nothing to do with a subject's recruitment position. Before making a financial decision, check the current bursary funding manual on GOV.UK and the Get Into Teaching website directly. This is independent guidance for orientation, not financial or careers advice, and it is not affiliated with the Department for Education, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, or any teaching union.