A scheme to tempt successful business professionals into second careers as classroom teachers has been launched by Now Teach. The recruitment problems have gotten worse year after year, this year four out of five schools have struggled to fill vacancies and the latest government figures showed that nearly a third of teachers who entered the profession in 2010 had dropped out within five years.

A new organisation, called Now Teach, has been co-founded by journalist Lucy Kellaway, who is herself giving up her job as columnist and associate editor of the Financial Times to teach maths in a “challenging” London secondary school. The charity was set up this year to give established professionals in the business world an opportunity to “do something meaningful” when they come to the end of their careers, and avoid a "colossal waste of talent."  

The idea follows a similar suggestion by Baroness Warnock, who last year proposed Teach Last, which would give skilled retirees from a range of backgrounds the chance to teach as a “second profession.” The rise in birth rates over the last decade have already been felt in Primary schools for a while now and the pressure has now started to hit secondary schools. Unless something is done immediately this is only going to get worse. Recruitment is beginning for a pilot year in 2017/18 which will be restricted to London secondaries. To begin with the focus is on finding maths and science teachers where there the biggest shortage lies, but the charity says they are also training professionals who want to teach other subjects.