GOVERNMENT plans to lure additional applicants for teaching jobs with the promise of paying off student loans for teachers in science subjects have been dismissed as "muddle-headed" by Oxford socialists. The loans pay-off scheme would operate over a 10-year period, and therefore represent the equivalent of an extra £1,000 a year to new teachers who stayed in post that long: nowhere near enough to enable them to cope with inflated housing costs in Oxford.

The latest hand-out, the latest in a long line of gimmicky "special payments", falls way below the extra 10% in salary which teaching unions have been demanding – and would apply to only a small number of new entrants to the profession.

"Here is yet another muddle-headed, half-baked attempt at a short-term fix for a long-term problem of the government’s own making," says John Lister, Socialist Alliance PPC for Oxford East. "Why not pay off the loans of geography teachers, English teachers, or the Billy Elliott-style ballet teachers they apparently now want to recruit? In fact why not pay off everybody’s loan, and go back to the system of student grants, which gave many ministers their free state education?"

"Can’t they see that fees and loans are driving thousands of students out of higher education, and plunging thousands more deep into debt. Those most deterred are the very working class students ministers claim they want to come to University.

"This latest government scheme tacitly admits that debts are a millstone around the necks of new graduates – one they shamefully imposed. Instead of claiming credit for paying off a few loans, ministers should scrap all fees and loans, and restore free education – funded through progressive taxation on big business and high earners."

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