The University of Oxford is offering £1,000 to highflying graduates who agree to teach in Britain’s most challenged urban secondary schools.

It hopes that in return the graduates will help to persuade more pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds to apply to study at Oxford and other leading universities.

The move follows research from the Sutton Trust educational charity, which recently found that half of state school teachers would never, or only rarely, encourage their brightest pupils to apply to Oxbridge.

Under the new Oxford scheme, to be introduced tomorrow, graduates of St Hugh’s College who successfully apply to a scheme known as Teach First will be paid a one-off bursary of £1,000.

Teach First targets high-achieving students who had not previously considered teaching and places them in some of England’s most challenging schools for two years.

Graduates qualify as teachers after one year and those that remain in the profession after two years (usually about half do) are often fast-tracked to senior positions in schools.

Those who leave teaching and move into the corporate sector with one of the major national and international organisations that back Teach First are often also put on a similar fast track to management positions.

Andrew Dilnot, Principal of St Hugh’s, said the £1,000 would help to cushion financial hardship for the Teach First graduates during the intensive six-week summer training course that they have to do before they start at a school. “We hope that the Teach First people from St Hugh’s will act as ambassadors for Oxford and for other universities. Because they are not much older than some of the pupils they are teaching, we hope they will be models for them and will show that people like them can go to Oxbridge,” he said. Mr Dilnot hoped that other Oxford and Cambridge colleges would follow suit and offer bursaries to Teach First candidates.

Noor Rassam, 23, a physics graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, who is in her second year as a Teach First science teacher at the Business Academy in Bexley, Kent, said the scheme had given her vital life and workplace experience that would be valuable in her preferred future career as a management consultant.

“In one Year 7 class I was trying to explain electricity,” she said. “They did not respond. So I got everyone to get up and walk around the class as I pretended to push them round. They were the current and I was the energy – the battery – that powered them to move. It worked, they got it.”

She thought the offer of a £1,000 bursary would be attractive to prospective Teach First candidates, who often struggled to afford their first rental deposit on a flat after leaving university.

Duncan Spalding, the Academy’s principal, is a firm supporter of Teach First and has so far recruited 33 teachers through it. Without a stream of talented graduates from Teach First, his school, located on the fringes of London, would not be able to fill all of its vacancies. “It’s not a quick fix for us because these teachers need a lot of support,” he said. “But it’s worth it because the teachers we get from Teach First are highly motivated and very bright.”

Lord Adonis, the Minister for Schools, said that the involvement of St Hugh’s represented the first official backing from the University of Oxford of Teach First. The St Hugh’s bursaries will be matched by the Sutton Trust, which will donate £1,000 to Teach First for every St Hugh’s bursary given.

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