The Scottish government today published a wide range of statistics about schools, teachers and pupils, and one of the most striking findings is that post-probationer teachers are finding work in Scottish state schools considerably harder to come by.
Here are some of the key findings:
New teachers’ employment prospects
The percentage of new teachers employed in publicly-funded schools in the first year following the Teacher Induction Scheme (TIS) - which guarantees a post in a school for one year after successful competition of initial teacher education - has decreased to 70 per cent for the most recent cohort (2021-22), from 80 per cent for the previous cohort (2020-21) and 85 per cent for the 2019-20 cohort. This is the lowest rate since the 88 per cent recorded for the 2016-17 cohort; it was under 60 per cent for the three cohorts from 2007-08 to 2009-10.
The proportion of probationers securing full-time permanent work has decreased since a recent high of 57 per cent for the 2016-17 cohort. This time, the proportion of TIS probationers in a full-time permanent post at the time of the following year’s census was 33 per cent, up from 31 per cent for the previous year; the proportion of the TIS probationer cohort in a full-time temporary post dropped from 42 to 30 per cent in a year.
Today’s figures come five days after Tes Scotland revealed that just 61 per cent of places on the main route into secondary teaching - the one-year secondary postgraduate PGDE route - have been filled this year, fuelling concerns that difficulties in finding secure work were deterring people from applying to become a teacher.
Teacher numbers, class sizes and the pupil-teacher ratio
Teacher numbers have dropped slightly - by 92 - from 54,285 in 2021 to 54,193 in 2022, but still remain more than 2,000 higher than before the Covid pandemic began (52,247 in 2019).
The overall average class size for primary has increased from 23.2 in 2021 to 23.3 in 2022
The overall pupil-teacher ratio of 13.2 is the same as in 2021 (which was the lowest recorded level since 2008). In primary, the pupil-teacher ratio has gone from 15.1 in 2021 to 15.3 in 2022, and in secondary it stayed at 12.4.
Additional support needs
There were 241,639 pupils (34.2 per cent of all pupils, the highest proportion ever recorded) with an additional support need (ASN) recorded in 2022. This was an increase of 1.2 percentage points on 2021 (33 per cent of all pupils).
Today, the Scottish Children’s Services Coalition said: ”While more children and young people are being identified as having ASN, this is against the increasingly challenging backdrop of a lack of specialist teachers, support staff and the resources needed to support them.”
Teacher ethnicity
Some 2 per cent of teachers are recorded as minority ethnic, while 92 per cent are recorded as various categories of white, and 6 per cent of teachers are recorded as either not known or not disclosed.
In 2020, Tes Scotland reported figures which showed that the proportion of black and ethnic-minority teachers in Scottish schools has barely changed in a decade, being at 1.6 per cent in 2019.
Part-time work
Female teachers were more likely to be in part-time work (21 per cent) than male teachers (8 per cent).
*Today’s new annual statistics can be read in full here
