This from an article by Martin George in the TES published 5th January 2018:
Charity that persuades high-flying professionals to switch careers to become teachers gets £350,000 of DfE funding
Now Teach was founded by former Financial Times journalist Lucy Kellaway (pictured), who last September re-entered the classroom at the age of 57 to become a trainee maths teacher at Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, East London.
Today the government has announced £350,000 of funding to help it to expand into Hastings, East Sussex, and to explore entry into other parts of the country.
Hastings is one of the government’s 12 flagship opportunity areas, which have been allocated a combined £72 million to improve social mobility.
The charity told Tes that it will also be looking at expanding into other opportunity areas, as it believes these are the parts of the country where its participants can make the most difference.
A spokesperson said: “We have an ambition to grow Now Teach across the UK and into the areas where our participants can support students that need them the most. We will be planning our expansion over the next few months with a focus on the DfE opportunity areas.”
Plan to supply hundreds of teachers
It hopes to recruit 80 people to start teaching in London and Hastings this September, and aims to expand to 500 teachers in five years’ time.
The spokesperson said that 43 of the original 47 teachers were still training, while two had dropped out and two had deferred.
Writing in the Financial Times this week, Ms Kellaway outlined one of the challenges faced by Now Teach participants.
“Everyone on the Now Teach programme has had long and mainly high-powered careers doing other things,” she said. “All of us have been paid to have opinions all our lives. For my ex-Foreign Office colleague, opinions were his stock in trade.
“Now, in order to learn faster, we need temporarily to disable our opinions. All the other Now Teach trainees who are faring the best are the ones who understand that for the first year or two they must shut up and learn.”
Now Teach will host a launch event at Hastings Pier on Saturday 20 January for interested would-be teachers.