This week the Scottish Parliament celebrated Dunoon Grammar School’s “sheer number of achievements”. The Argyll and Bute Council school has racked up a wide range of awards - including being declared one of the world’s best schools in 2022 - and has received plaudits for its broad curriculum.
As education secretary Jenny Gilruth said on Tuesday, Dunoon Grammar “has facilitated access to more than 50 skills-based courses” for its students.
Yet headteacher David Mitchell says the school’s efforts to give students as wide a range of experiences and qualifications as possible are being thwarted by teacher shortages in certain subject areas. Even the development of essential skills such as literacy are being undermined by an inability to recruit the right staff.
“As a school we are looking at widening our senior-phase options but recruitment and staff shortages mean in some cases we are unable to offer these opportunities,” Mitchell tells Tes Scotland.
“Believe it or not, we find it difficult to recruit English teachers. We are always short staffed. This has an impact on our literacy levels.”
Over 100 miles away, on the opposite side of the country, Bruce Robertson, head at Berwickshire High School in the Scottish Borders, is also wrestling with recruitment difficulties: he is down two maths teachers and has been for two years.
The latest job advert for the posts closes on 20 February but he says he is “not at all confident” that they will be filled.
Teacher recruitment problems across Scotland
These problems are replicated all of over the country. In November Laurence Findlay, Aberdeenshire Council’s director of education and children’s services, shared the recruitment woes of his secondary schools with Tes Scotland.
Findlay said every secondary in his authority was affected by teacher shortages. A survey of Aberdeenshire headteachers found some subjects being scaled back or removed from the curriculum entirely because of this paucity of staff. Non-specialists were delivering lessons in hard-to-recruit subjects such as maths, and primary teachers were being used to plug gaps in the curriculum.
At Berwickshire High, Robertson says PE and science teachers have been teaching S1-2 maths, while support-for-learning teachers have also been delivering lessons in the subject, as has a depute head.
“While all of the teachers are doing a really great job, it should be self-evident that the best teacher to have working with students would be one who is a qualified maths teacher,” he adds.
‘Terrible’ situation for students
At Dunoon Grammar Mitchell is advertising for a home economics teacher, a technical teacher, a PE teacher and an acting principal teacher of English, Gaelic and literacy.
He says the school has struggled to recruit home economics staff over a long period and has gone from having three teachers in 2013 to just one now. It no longer offers home economics in S1-2 or S5-6.
Mitchell describes the situation as “terrible” for students with an interest in this area.
Politicians are not blind to these challenges.
On Tuesday, while celebrating Dunoon Grammar’s achievements, Scottish Conservative education spokesperson Liam Kerr asked the education secretary what was being done “to ensure that new teachers choose to make their lives and careers in our more rural areas”?
Gilruth talked about the financial incentives councils could choose to offer and hinted it might be time to look at the way probationers are allocated to different councils.
Waning interest in preference waiver
She also wanted to understand why fewer probationers are opting to “tick the [preference waiver] box” and be placed in any authority for their induction year in exchange for £6,000 if they work in primary and £8,000 if they work in secondary.
General Teaching Council for Scotland figures show that typically around one in 10 probationers agree to be placed anywhere every year, but that proportion is falling.
Gilruth also said she had asked the Strategic Board for Teacher Education to advise on the issue of teacher shortages and provide “options for moving forward”.
However, shortages in subjects such as maths, technical education, home economics and computing are not a new problem. When John Swinney was education secretary from 2016 to 2021, a range of “alternative routes” into teaching were launched in a bid to plug gaps in exactly these subjects.
Some, like the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in transformative learning and teaching, which prepares teachers to work across the primary-secondary transition, have survived. However, others such as the University of Dundee’s supported induction route, which fast-tracked secondary specialists in shortage areas into the profession, have withered on the vine.
But the need for more teachers has not gone away; teacher education targets in these key areas have not been hit for years, with the latest figures showing almost 40 per cent of places on the one-year secondary PGDE postgraduate route went unfilled in 2022-23.
Unsurprisingly, Robertson wants more teachers to be trained in priority subjects, like maths. He also says headteachers need bigger staffing budgets so they aren’t “always operating on a shoestring”.
“I should be able to over-staff if I want to, as a contingency plan for staff being ill or moving on,” he says. “But I can’t do that because of budgetary constraints.”
‘Most rewarding job in the world’
Meanwhile, Mitchell says “we need to think out of the box to attract and retain teachers” - there needs to be more promotion routes for teachers and “the buzz” needs to be brought back into teaching.
“It is the most rewarding job in the world but we get bogged down in negativity,” he says. “We need to start sharing all the good things about teaching and the positive news stories about our young people.
“The best part of the job is being with young people, seeing their faces light up, having some banter and seeing them grow into young adults. We need to promote this more.”
Schools themselves need to promote teaching as a career to their pupils, says Mitchell, and councils must get into universities to promote their areas to student teachers and encourage them to explore beyond the Central Belt.
“I also think we should be offering work placements in our schools for people who are interested in teaching as a career,” he says.
In the meantime, Dunoon Grammar is striving to keep the experiences it offers as broad as possible by using online learning and college lecturers to deliver courses. It is even exploring the possibility of a local filmmaker delivering a National Progression Award in film and media.
However, there is only so much that schools can do to mitigate the failure of local and national government to get workforce planning right.
The message from headteachers is clear: fix teacher recruitment or young people will pay the price.
For the latest Scottish education news, analysis and features delivered directly to your inbox, sign up to Tes magazine’s The Week in Scotland newsletter
