Education secretary Jenny Gilruth has said she is looking for “quick solutions” and “innovative approaches” to the lack of stable employment for primary teachers - including encouraging them to gain an another qualification to become additional support needs (ASN) specialists.
This would have the “additional benefit of supporting the growing number of children with ASN” - as well as providing employment for primary teachers who are struggling to find work or employed on temporary contracts.
In the Scottish Parliament yesterday during education questions, Ms Gilruth also said the government planned to survey universities in a bid to understand how they are helping student teachers on postgraduate and undergraduate courses to cope with the range of ASN in classrooms, to ensure “consistency across the piece”.
She said: “These young people are part of our system; they are not an add-on anymore. In schools I visit now, sometimes over 50 per cent of the pupil population has an additional support need.”
The revelation that ASN input during initial teacher education is to be audited was made after Labour MSP Martin Whitfield, a former primary teacher, highlighted the number of placing requests for special schools refused by councils, as well as the reduction in the number of special schools in Scotland: he said there were 190 special schools in 2006 and 107 last year.
Mr Whitfield called on the government to “increase funding and resources” to ensure that all children requiring specialised support can access it.
‘Shocking waste of talent’
Ms Gilruth’s comment that primary teachers seeking secure contracts could undertake further training to make them more employable came after Tory MSP Stephen Kerr highlighted that fewer than one in five primary teachers secured a permanent contract following probation last year.
Mr Kerr described the situation as “a shocking waste of talent” and “a dismal failure of workforce planning”.
Ms Gilruth said she was focused on three challenges in relation to teacher recruitment: the lack of permanent jobs for primary teachers; the difficulty schools have filling certain secondary subject areas; and the problems schools in remote and rural areas face recruiting teachers.
She said: “I want to find some quick solutions to try to essentially deliver on some of the members’ aspirations here. There are some innovative approaches that we are looking at, at the current time - so, for example, encouraging primary teachers to gain an additional qualification to become an additional support needs specialist, if they would like to.”
Scottish Teachers for Permanence, a campaign group with more than 3,500 Facebook members, is calling for immediate action to address the jobs crisis, including cutting the number of places on teacher education courses to address the “huge backlog” of teachers “who can’t get permanent jobs”.
Minutes from the Teacher Workforce Planning Advisory Group, published earlier this month, reveal this is now being considered, with primary initial teacher education courses facing cuts of between 10 and 20 per cent over two years (2025-26 and 2026-27).
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