Physics Teacher Bursary & Pay Support (2026/27)

Almost every page you will find about training to teach physics leads with the same number. £29,000, tax free, for a one-year postgraduate course. It is a genuinely large sum and it deserves to be mentioned. But it is also identical to the bursary for chemistry, computing and mathematics, which means the number tells you nothing at all about physics specifically — and it distracts from the things that genuinely are different about training to teach this subject in England.

Those things are worth knowing before you commit a year of your life. Physics has a professional body that funds and runs its own scholarship scheme with a professional support structure built around it. Physics has a recruitment and staffing position that is meaningfully worse than the other three subjects sharing its funding tier. And physics, uniquely alongside modern languages, was singled out in a mid-cycle DfE funding change in May 2026 that removed bursary access for a large share of the people who were previously applying. This page covers those three things, and deliberately does not re-tabulate the bursary rates you can read elsewhere.

Why physics is a different case from the other funded subjects

For 2026/27 the Department for Education put chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics on an identical £29,000 bursary, and chemistry, computing and physics on an identical £31,000 scholarship. Looked at purely as a funding decision, the four subjects are interchangeable. Looked at as a staffing problem, they are not remotely alike.

The gap shows up most clearly in the recruitment data. In the DfE's Initial Teacher Training Census for 2025/26, published on 4 December 2025, mathematics recruited 114% of its postgraduate target and chemistry 120% — both comfortably above target, and in maths's case for the first time in over a decade. Physics recruited 78%. Computing recruited 81%. Two of the four subjects on the top funding tier are now, on the census, recruiting above what the department thinks it needs, and two are not.

That matters for how you read advice about physics training. A lot of what circulates online treats "the four shortage subjects" as a single block, because that is how the funding and the Targeted Retention Incentive are structured. On the actual supply numbers that block has come apart, and physics is at the bottom of it.

The second thing that separates physics is the existence of a well-resourced, long-running professional body scheme that does more than write cheques. The Institute of Physics has delivered teacher training scholarships on behalf of the DfE for many years, and has built a support programme around them. Chemistry has an equivalent through the Royal Society of Chemistry and computing through BCS, and we compare all of them in our teacher training scholarships compared guide. Maths, notably, lost its equivalent for 2026/27. But the IOP's is the one with the most explicit link to a national campaign about the state of the subject, which changes what being a scholar actually means.

The IOP scholarship: what you actually get

The Institute of Physics Teacher Training Scholarship is worth £31,000, tax free, and the IOP made 175 awards available for trainees starting physics initial teacher training in England in September 2026. The money is funded by the Department for Education; the IOP selects the recipients and runs the programme around them.

Four benefits come with the award that the standard bursary does not carry:

• Continuing professional development. Access to the IOP's CPD workshops and events during your training year. This is the same professional development infrastructure the IOP provides to practising physics teachers, which means you are being trained alongside people already in post rather than only alongside other trainees.
• Subject-specific mentoring. Your training provider will give you a school mentor, but that mentor may not be a physics specialist — in a department with no physics degree holder, they will not be. The IOP mentoring is explicitly subject-specific, which fills a gap that is genuinely common rather than hypothetical.
• A scholar network. Membership of a network of fellow IOP scholars and physics teachers across the UK. Its practical value is highest for exactly the people most likely to need it: a trainee placed in a school where they are the only person with a physics background.
• Free IOP membership for the training year. This carries the ordinary member benefits — journals, resources, events, the professional registration pathway — and it means you arrive in your first teaching post already inside the professional body rather than having to find it later.

It is worth being blunt about the relative weight of these. The cash difference between the scholarship and the bursary is £2,000 across a whole training year — real money, but not life-changing, and after ten monthly instalments it is £200 a month. If you are choosing whether to bother applying for a scholarship, the £2,000 is not the reason to. The reason is that physics teaching is a subject where professional isolation is a documented, measurable problem, and a scholarship buys you a structural answer to it in your first year.

Scholarship vs bursary: they are not additive

This is the single most common misunderstanding about subject body scholarships, and it costs people nothing financially but does distort how they plan. A scholarship replaces the bursary. You do not receive £29,000 plus £31,000. You receive £31,000 instead of £29,000, and your training provider is informed which applies to you.

Two practical consequences follow. First, applying for a scholarship carries no financial downside: if you are unsuccessful, you fall back on the bursary, which you would have received anyway. Second, you should not treat a scholarship as a reason to choose physics over another subject on financial grounds — a £2,000 differential is not a career decision. It is a reason to apply once you have already decided on physics.

How to apply, and when

The pattern across recent cycles is worth understanding even though the exact dates move. Broadly, the sequence looks like this:

If you want to ask a direct question about eligibility rather than infer it, the IOP publishes a contact address for its teacher scholarship team. That is a more reliable route than forum threads, which in this area are consistently a year or more out of date.

The shortage the scheme exists to fix

The IOP does not run its scholarship scheme in isolation. It sits inside a sustained public campaign about the state of physics teaching in England, and the statistics from that campaign are the clearest explanation of why physics is treated differently from the other funded subjects — and of what you are likely to walk into.

In September 2025 the IOP published The physics teacher shortage and addressing it through the 3Rs: Retention, Recruitment and Retraining (England). Its central findings were stark, and they were widely reported at the time:

• A quarter of English state secondary schools have no specialist physics teacher at all. This comes from NFER analysis of the School Workforce Census published in July 2025, covering a sample of 2,296 secondary schools.
• Around 58% of GCSE-level physics lessons are taught by a non-specialist. The IOP arrived at this by combining two figures: that just 16% of combined science teaching hours are delivered by a physics teacher with a post-A-level physics qualification, and that 72% of separate physics GCSE teaching hours are delivered by a specialist.
• More than 700,000 GCSE pupils across both GCSE years are studying physics without a specialist physics teacher — more than 350,000 in Year 11 alone.
• England is short of roughly 3,500 specialist physics teachers.
• Nearly half — 44% — of newly trained physics teachers leave the profession within five years.

The consequences the report identifies are not abstract. Pupils in schools with no specialist physics teacher are around half as likely to go on to A-level physics, and roughly 300 schools send no pupils at all to A-level physics. Seventy per cent of A-level physics students come from just 30% of schools. The IOP put the cost to the UK economy at approximately £1.5 billion a year and called for £120 million of investment over ten years — £12 million annually — to address recruitment, retention and the retraining of existing non-specialist teachers.

Read those numbers as a prospective trainee and two implications follow. The first is about your value in the labour market: a qualified physics specialist is genuinely scarce, and that scarcity is durable rather than cyclical, which is worth knowing when you come to negotiate your starting pay point. The second is about what your working life is likely to look like. If a quarter of schools have no physics specialist, then a meaningful share of physics jobs involve being the only person in the building who knows the subject to degree level. That is precisely the situation in which an external mentoring relationship and a subject network stop being a perk and start being the thing that keeps you in the job.

It also explains the retention figure. A 44% five-year attrition rate among newly trained physics teachers is not mainly a pay story — physics teachers are on the same statutory pay scales as everyone else, plus the retention incentive where their school qualifies. It is much more plausibly a story about professional isolation, being timetabled across sciences you did not train in, and carrying the whole subject alone. Which is the case the IOP itself makes.

What the 2025/26 recruitment data actually shows

The picture is genuinely improving, and it would be dishonest to present the shortage figures above without that context. The DfE's Initial Teacher Training Census for 2025/26 recorded 1,086 new postgraduate physics entrants, which was 36% up on 2024/25 and the highest physics intake since 2014/15. Against target, physics moved from 31% in 2024/25 to 78% in 2025/26 — an enormous single-year swing.

Two caveats keep that from being an unambiguous good-news story. The first is that the target itself was lowered: the DfE reduced postgraduate trainee need substantially for the 2026-27 cycle on the basis of falling pupil rolls and improved retention, so part of the improvement in the percentage reflects a smaller denominator rather than only a larger numerator. Both effects are real and both are doing work.

The second is composition. In 2025/26 the proportion of physics entrants who were UK nationals fell from 49% to 37%, with non-UK and non-EEA nationals making up around 59% of the intake by one reading of the census and around 63% by the figure cited in reporting on the subsequent funding change. Physics recruitment recovered substantially on the back of international applicants — which is exactly what makes the May 2026 change to overseas eligibility, covered next, consequential rather than technical.

The May 2026 overseas eligibility pause

This is the most significant change to physics training funding in the current cycle, and it happened mid-year rather than at a cycle boundary, which is why a lot of guidance online has not caught up with it.

The general rule in the DfE's bursary funding manual is that a trainee is only eligible for a training bursary or scholarship if they are entitled to support under the student finance criteria — which non-UK nationals generally are not. Since 2023, physics and languages were the two exceptions to that rule, deliberately carved out because both subjects were recruiting badly and both drew heavily on international applicants.

From 5pm on Thursday 7 May 2026, the DfE removed that exception. The 2026 to 2027 bursary funding manual now states that languages and physics trainees do not need to be eligible for student finance to receive a bursary only if they were offered a place on the course before 5pm on 7 May 2026 — offers made after that moment are subject to the same criteria as every other subject.

• Who is unaffected: anyone holding an ITT offer made before 5pm on 7 May 2026. The DfE said it would contact affected applicants directly.
• Who is affected: overseas applicants who received or receive an offer after that time, who are now outside bursary and scholarship eligibility for physics unless they are separately entitled to student finance support.
• The DfE's stated reason: improved recruitment. The department framed the move as a "pause" to be reviewed for the next recruitment cycle rather than a permanent removal.
• The scale: in 2025/26, around 63% of physics trainees and 42% of modern foreign languages trainees were non-UK or non-EEA nationals, so the change reaches a large share of the applicant pool in both subjects.

The reaction was critical across the sector. The Institute of Physics described the change as deeply disappointing and said it left candidates in limbo. An NFER analyst argued this was not the moment to scale back an approach that had been working. The chief executive of NASBTT, the body representing school-based training providers, called it exceptionally unhelpful and said it created avoidable disruption. The common thread in all three is timing rather than principle: a mid-cycle change that lands after many applicants have already made plans is harder to defend than the same change announced at the start of a recruitment round.

What physics teaching actually pays once you qualify

Physics teachers are paid on exactly the same statutory pay ranges as every other classroom teacher in England. There is no physics premium in the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document, no subject uplift, and no separate scale. A physics teacher and a drama teacher on the same pay point in the same school earn the same salary. Our 2026/27 teacher pay scales page has the full ranges.

What physics does attract is the additional payments layer sitting beside the pay scales, and there are two that matter:

• The Targeted Retention Incentive. Physics is one of four school subjects on the list, worth £3,000 to £6,000 a year to early-career teachers in eligible state-funded secondary and special schools in England. Eligibility depends on your school's pupil premium decile and Education Investment Area status — see our full guide to the incentive. It is not pensionable, which matters more than people expect.
• STPCD recruitment and retention payments. Schools have discretionary power under the pay document to make additional payments to recruit or retain a teacher, and shortage subjects are the classic case for using it. This is school-level and negotiable rather than automatic, which is precisely why it is worth raising at offer stage rather than after you have accepted.

The scarcity figures earlier in this page are, in practical terms, negotiating context. A school advertising a physics post in a market where a quarter of schools have no specialist at all is not in a strong position to treat the advertised starting point as fixed. That does not guarantee you anything, but it should change how you approach the conversation — our guide to negotiating your starting pay point covers how to make that case without overplaying it.

One thing to model properly rather than assume: the training year itself. A £29,000 bursary or £31,000 scholarship is not taxed like a salary, so it lands close to its headline value, but it is paid in ten monthly instalments starting in early October rather than as a lump sum in September. That first unpaid month catches people out every year. Run the numbers through our take-home pay calculator alongside your expected first-year teaching salary so you can see the step down from a £31,000 tax-free training year to an ECT salary taxed normally — which, in net terms, is a step down for most people, and is much easier to plan for if you have seen it in advance.

If you don't get a scholarship

Most physics trainees do not. With 175 awards against 1,086 postgraduate physics entrants in 2025/26, the scholarship reaches a minority of the cohort by design. Missing out costs you £2,000 across the year and access to the IOP programme. The £2,000 is not recoverable; a good deal of the rest is.

• IOP membership is available directly. The free membership year is a scholarship benefit, but membership itself is open to anyone and is not expensive relative to what a training year costs. If the network is the part you wanted, you can buy into it.
• Subject-specific CPD exists outside the scholarship. The IOP, the Ogden Trust, STEM Learning and the national network of physics-specific professional development providers all run events open to non-scholars. Ask your training provider which ones they have relationships with.
• Subject knowledge enhancement courses are a separate funding stream. If your degree is physics-adjacent rather than physics, an SKE course may be available before your ITT year, sometimes with its own bursary attached. That is worth investigating early, because it changes your timeline.
• Your mentoring gap is worth raising at placement stage. If you are placed in a school with no physics specialist, say so to your provider rather than absorbing it. Providers can often arrange cross-school subject mentoring, but generally only if someone asks.

And it is worth keeping the scholarship in proportion. It is a good scheme and a genuine credential, but the thing that determines whether you have a sustainable career teaching physics is the department you land in and whether you have access to other physicists. A scholarship is one route to that. It is not the only one.

Sources, and what we could not verify

The scholarship details on this page — the £31,000 value, the 175 awards for September 2026 entry, the closure of the 2026-27 application window, the register-interest route for 2027-28, and the four benefit categories of CPD workshops, subject-specific mentoring, the scholar network and free IOP membership for the training year — come from the Institute of Physics's own teacher training scholarships page and from NASBTT's notice of the scheme's opening. The shortage statistics are from the IOP's The physics teacher shortage and addressing it through the 3Rs: Retention, Recruitment and Retraining (England), published 4 September 2025, and from contemporary reporting of it in Tes on 2 September 2025, which sets out the IOP's methodology for the 700,000 figure. The quarter-of-schools statistic within that report derives from NFER's July 2025 analysis of the School Workforce Census across a sample of 2,296 secondary schools.

Recruitment figures are from the DfE's Initial Teacher Training Census, academic year 2025/26, published 4 December 2025 on Explore Education Statistics, with the 2024/25 comparators from the previous year's release. The bursary and scholarship values, the student finance eligibility rule and the 7 May 2026 cut-off are from the DfE's Initial teacher training bursary funding manual: 2026 to 2027 academic year on GOV.UK. The account of the overseas eligibility change, the sector reaction and the international trainee proportions is from Schools Week's reporting of 11 May 2026.

Figures in this area move every cycle, and the May 2026 change shows they can move mid-cycle. Before making a financial decision, check the current bursary funding manual on GOV.UK and the IOP's own scholarships page directly. This is independent guidance for orientation, not financial or immigration advice, and it is not affiliated with the Department for Education, the Institute of Physics or any teaching union.