The online system for placing student teachers in schools is facing “real issues”, which are resulting in university staff “working way beyond their hours” and at weekends in order to avoid “peak activity times”, says a new report.
The evaluation of how the Student Placement System (SPS), run by the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), coped this academic year reveals that, although the proportion of schools offering student placement increased, councils and universities continued to report “extensive experience of having real issues with functionality”.
The research, which involved 13 councils and nine of Scotland’s 10 teacher-education institutions, shows that the universities and councils complained about the slowness of the system and its inability to cope during peak times. They said that it crashed regularly, logged users out without warning “every day, several times a day”, and could not cope with non-standard placements, such as dual subject placements in secondary.
Meanwhile, councils reported that schools that did offer this kind of more complex placement often ended up “overburdened” with students.
Problems with school placements
However, the GTCS mounted a robust defence of the system, saying it had risen to the challenge of finding over 18,000 placements for 4-5,000 students this academic year and that these were placed “more effectively and quickly than ever before”.
Ellen Doherty, GTCS director of education, registration and professional learning and development, said the report was a piece of “self-reflection” to see which areas of the SPS could be improved, but she stressed that only 13 of Scotland’s 32 local authorities had responded to the evaluation and that it was not “definitive”.
Ms Doherty also said that the SPS could only be as good as the quality of the information entered into it. The first round of SPS automatic matching typically resulted in over 90 per cent of students being placed, she said, but if a student or a school’s circumstances changed they then had to be rematched.
“SPS is not just a technical system, it is supported by the partners around it, and it is important they give the right information at the right time,” said Ms Doherty. “Inaccurate information affects the functionality of the system.”
The SPS was launched in 2014. It is a national system designed to enable the automatic matching of student teachers from Scottish universities to school placement offers.
In the past it was believed that difficulties in matching students to placements were caused by an “unacceptable” number of schools failing to offer any practical experience to trainees. That prompted a change to the system that meant schools not wanting to offer placements had to opt out, as opposed to opting in.
This academic year the figures show that just 7 per cent of primaries and 4 per cent of secondaries failed to offer any student places - a considerable improvement on 2015-16 when Tes Scotland revealed that 19 per cent of primaries and 16 per cent of secondaries had not offered any places to student teachers.
However, the new report reveals that some issues remain.
The report says: “Stakeholders report extensive experience of having real issues with functionality while working with the SPS system itself. The level of manual matching required, rechecking and confirming of placement matches placed stakeholders under a lot of pressure. This was especially evident in relation to the matching of non-standard and retrieval placements. This generates additional and at times excessive demands on their time, especially when this may only be a small part of some stakeholders’ overall remit.
“This is especially evident during crucial stages of the matching process. Nonetheless, a very limited number of stakeholders currently consider ‘opting out’ as an option.”
