Ethnic Minority Student Teachers Offered £5,000 More Than White Peers to Train Under 'Anti-Racist' Scheme

Ethnic Minority Student Teachers Offered £5,000 More Than White Peers to Train Under ‘Anti-Racist’ Scheme

Ethnic minority students have been offered £5,000 more than their white classmates to become teachers in Wales as part of an ‘anti-racist’ scheme. The Mail has more.

All training teachers are eligible to receive a £15,000 grant from the Welsh Government if they specialise in a subject most needed in the country’s schools.

This includes biology, chemistry, physics, IT, design and technology, Welsh, modern foreign languages as well as maths.

As part of the Labour government’s ‘Anti-racist Wales’ action plan an additional £5,000 is available to individuals who are from ethnic minorities.

The scheme aims to progress Wales “significantly towards being an anti-racist nation by 2030”. It follows calls to ban dogs from the countryside by Climate Cymru BAME to make the outdoors “anti-racist”.

A government spokesman previously insisted it was not planning to act on the proposal compiled by environmental group, and dogs “would continue to be welcomed in the hills of Wales”.

It comes after Wales’s score in the previous 2022 international Pisa assessments fell to their lowest on record for 15 year-old’s in science, maths and reading. The Celtic nation also landed last among all UK countries.

Welsh Conservative Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Education Natasha Ashgar has since hit out at the scheme amid what she called a “recruitment and retention crisis” in Wales.

She said Wales’s Labour Government should be focusing its sights on getting the best maths teachers in schools, “regardless of their ethnicity”.

“This additional funding for ethnic minority maths teachers increases the total grant to £25,000 — significantly higher than what is available to teachers from non-ethnic backgrounds,” she told the Times,

“With the alarming number of mathematics teachers leaving the profession and so few being recruited, surely the Welsh Labour Government should be offering equal funding for all mathematics teachers.”