Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham University's Centre for Education and Employment Research has commented on a study of data collected by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) for the academic year 2009/10.

An analysis of the data found that only 24% of trainee physics teachers had a degree classed 2.2 or higher, and the figure for chemistry fell to 20%.

Government policy is changing to not fund students on ITT courses who do not have a good degree in the subject they want to teach, however Professor Smithers commented that “the difficult question that has to be faced in formulating policy is: is it better to have an able graduate who has not studied a subject at university or someone who has studied the subject at university but not done very well in it?”

'Is it better, for example, to have a good biologist or a poor physicist teaching physics?