Scotland’s education secretary has held meetings with the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) to explore “creative ways” to encourage primary teachers to retrain to teach in secondary schools, she said today.

Jenny Gilruth made the comments as she addressed concerns about the low number of teachers finding permanent work after their probation year.

“We are looking at creative ways in which primary teachers might want to consider retraining in secondary,” she said.

“Now that requires dual qualification, for example, so we’re working with the GTCS on how that might be facilitated.”

Ms Gilruth added: “My officials are urgently working on a piece of work to that end because, where primary teachers might have the right qualifications, they can work in our secondary schools, and it’s important they’re supported to do that.”

In an article for Tes in June 2025, GTCS chief executive Pauline Stephen said that more teachers could be making use of opportunities to gain registration across both primary and secondary schools.

New teachers can’t find permanent jobs

Ms Gilruth also said today that more newly qualified teachers should be encouraged to use the “preference waiver scheme” to be posted anywhere in the country - which comes with a financial incentive - as she did when she qualified as a teacher in 2008-09.

She said: “You’re not guaranteed a job on qualification, you have to go out there and look for one. You have to apply to a range of different local authorities, that’s exactly the pathway that I followed.”

Teachers are “more expensive to employ” than they were in 2021, the education secretary said as Scottish government statistics for 2024-25 showed that only one in four newly qualified teachers secured a permanent job: 2,294 NQTs completed their probation year, but only 568 got a permanent post.

Of those who did not find permanent work, 1,015 are in temporary or fixed-term contracts.

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland this morning, Ms Gilruth said: “We do think meeting...teaching unions’ expectations on teacher pay was the right thing to do, but it has cost the government in excess of £800 million since 2021, so we recognise that challenge.”

She added: “Teacher numbers across the board since 2014 have increased. They are increasing in the past year alone, thanks to extra funding that we put in last year’s Budget that was protected for this purpose.”

The Scottish government said in its 2021 manifesto that it would reduce teacher workload by employing 3,500 additional teachers and reducing maximum class-contact time to 21 hours per week, from 22.5 hours.

Failure to deliver that policy has been heavily criticised by unions, which have been balloting members over strike action on workload.

‘Protected funding’ for teacher numbers

Ms Gilruth said the government’s independent modelling showed that teacher numbers in 2023 were sufficient to deliver the class-contact commitment.

“That’s why last year I protected funding in the Budget. It was enhanced for councils to protect teacher numbers and bring them back to 2023 levels,” she said.

“There was also extra funding in that for [additional support needs], which also could be used to support teacher employment. It’s hugely important that, at central level, the government protects that funding, but we don’t employ teachers, which is why we need our local authorities to use that protected budget to create more posts.”

Andrea Bradley, general secretary of the EIS teaching union, told the BBC today: “If you want to value education in Scotland, then that means valuing the workforce that delivers that education.”

On Friday, after it emerged that the EIS was to reballot members over strike action, Ms Bradley said that local government organisation Cosla and the government had “made promises to Scotland’s teachers and pupils that action would be taken to employ additional teachers, reduce teachers’ class-contact time, cut teacher workload and create a better working environment for teachers and pupils alike”.

She added: “We cannot let the politicians off the hook on their promises and we cannot take our collective foot off the gas in our workload campaign.”

You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get Tes magazine on iOS and on Android