More than 100 students have been left with “no realistic option” but to pursue a judicial review against a teacher training initiative they feel is exclusionary, their solicitor has said.
Phoenix Law said it had served “pre-action correspondence” to the Department for Education in relation to the eligibility criteria of the Initial Teacher Education Bursary Scheme.
The firm said the scheme excludes 120 students who are already training in the specified high-need subjects in Northern Ireland.
The Initial Teacher Education Bursary Scheme is an initiative to attract graduates into teaching by offering financial incentives for Initial Teacher Training courses in designated subjects.
Undergraduates will receive £17,000 for a PGCE in order to meet their tuition fees. A further £1,000 per month is also being offered to help with living costs whilst studying.
The bursary comes with the expectation that those who receive it will teach in Northern Ireland for a minimum of two years.
The scheme will come into effect from September this year, but students who began their degrees in 2023, 2024 and 2025 will not be eligible.
Phoenix Law said “every one” of the impacted students they are representing has “offered, in writing, to sign the identical two-year commitment” as their funded counterpart.
Solicitor Jack Murphy said the challenge “matters well beyond the 120 students who have instructed us”.
He added: “It goes to how public money is spent on the teaching workforce at a time when schools across Northern Ireland cannot staff maths, science, technology and Irish-medium classrooms, and to whether a department can define the purpose of its own scheme so narrowly that an entire cohort of trainee specialists falls outside it without their position ever being properly assessed.
“The department says the fundamental purpose of the scheme is to increase new entrants. But that is not all the scheme does.
“It also requires every student who receives the money to commit to teaching in a school in the North for two years after qualifying.
Phoenix Law said the students it represents have offered to sign a two-year commitment to teach in Northern Ireland (Ben Birchall/PA)
“That is a condition about keeping teachers here, not about recruiting them, and the department has said so itself in correspondence.
“Our clients have offered to sign that very same commitment. Nobody has ever assessed their proposal against it.
“A public authority cannot define its objective more narrowly than its own scheme and then use that definition to shut out everything that falls outside the line it has drawn.
“Our clients are not seeking compensation, or back pay, or anything at all that the 2026 entrants are not receiving.
“They asked for the same deal, from the same date, on the same term, in exchange for 240 years of guaranteed specialist teaching in Northern Ireland classrooms.”
He added: “The department has told these students in writing that their concerns are legitimate and has acknowledged their sense of injustice.
“Having said both of those things, it offered them nothing at all and closed the file. Decisions of this kind have to be taken lawfully, on the relevant considerations, and by a process the department actually follows.
“That is what a judicial review examines, and it is why these students have had no realistic option but to take this step.”
The firm also claims students in the impacted cohort are reconsidering whether they can afford to remain in Northern Ireland to teach, and are being actively recruited by England, where bursaries of up to £30,000 are available in some subjects.