New teacher training salaries have pushed teaching career inquiries up from about 2,000 a week to a peak of nearly 11,000, but applications are still below last year's.
The latest Teacher Training Agency figures show that its Pounds 70 million scheme to pay postgraduate trainee teachers a salary of up to Pounds 10,000 in some subjects, tied to a major recruitment campaign, may be tempting undergraduates into teaching.
TTA figures show that calls peaked at 11,000 in the second week of the campaign and were running at 8,000 a week in week three. This is significantly higher than in previous advertising campaigns, when the call-rate has been about 2,000 a week.
TTA chief executive Ralph Tabberer said: "Getting the inquiries is a good start. We now have to work on how those inquiries are turned into applications."
Mr Tabberer, who will next week launch the agency's three-year corporate plan, including its first ever marketing strategy, said it was too early to say what the impact of the salaries on actual applications will be. But he said they were "closing the gap". A key part of the strategy is partnerships with universities.
The TTA intends to track inquiries and has built up a database. Mr Tabberer said: "We want to make this available to universities so that if we have an inquiry from someone wanting to teach physics in the Northeast, the appropriate university can be informed."
Mr Tabberer also said he wanted to work with universities' education departments to help them improve.
He said: "In the past four years there have been massive improvements, with the percentage of departments rated A/B rising from 50 per cent to 75 per cent. We want to offer frontline providers more support."
According to teacher training consultant John Howson, the TTA strategy has cut the drop in applications to secondary PGCE courses on last year by about a third.
Mr Howson agreed it was too early to tell whether inquiries would turn into applications. On April 1 this year applications to these courses were 10,076 - a 13 per cent drop on last year.