Key Scottish government pledges to increase teacher numbers and also to cut the amount of time teachers spend delivering lessons could be at risk following a huge drop in recruitment on to university secondary teacher education courses.
Now options such as lowering entry requirements for initial teacher education (ITE) courses are being considered in a bid to address the recruitment challenges - as well as using primary teachers to take lessons in early secondary.
Figures obtained exclusively by Tes Scotland show 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. Some 85 per cent of places were filled in 2021 and, in 2020, 92 per cent of places were filled.
The figures show the situation is particularly acute for priority subject areas such as science and maths, with universities filling at best just half of the available places.
Priority subjects include chemistry, technological education, modern languages, physics, maths and computing. In chemistry 70 per cent of places were unfilled; in technological educational, 60 per cent; in modern languages, 57 per cent; in both physics and maths, 54 per cent; and in computing, 50 per cent.
All primary teacher education courses hit or exceeded their recruitment targets this year. The contrasting trends in the sector are, the report says, ”likely to result in pupil-teacher ratios reducing in primary but remaining fairly stable in secondary”.
When the Scottish Funding Council set the teacher education intake targets this year - and increased the target for secondary by 200 places - it said the statistical modelling had looked at the number of students required to meet the government’s pledge to recruit “at least 3,500 additional teachers over the course of this Parliament”.
It is also these extra teachers the government is relying on to deliver its pledge to cut class-contact time by 90 minutes a week.
However, while the target for the secondary PGDE was 2,000, just 1,211 places were filled - equating to 61 per cent.
The figures were contained in a paper, dated “November 2022”, prepared for the government’s Strategic Board for Teacher Education.
The paper identified the PGDE secondary as “the main area for concern”.
The paper said: “Recruitment to PGDE secondary this year has been especially challenging. This may be down to a combination of factors, such as...reduced appeal of the job of a teacher. Indeed, reduced recruitment in ITE is being seen across the UK.”
In a section entitled “Ideas to help address recruitment challenges”, the paper continued: “It has been suggested that an area that can potentially assist recruitment is more flexibility with regard to entry requirements. The Memorandum on Entry Requirements to Programmes of Initial Teacher Education is seen by some to be a barrier to potential students in some subjects and consideration is needed to see if they can be modified without lowering standards.”
On the topic of “more effective use of primary teachers in the broad general education” phase, the paper asked: “Can local authorities make better use of primary teachers in the early phase of secondary?”
Responding to the figures, Seamus Searson, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, warned that unless the government started to pay teachers properly, it risked being unable to staff Scottish secondary schools.
Scottish teaching unions are in dispute with councils and the government over pay.
The government says the latest offer - which saw early career teachers offered a bigger rise than more experienced staff - is “a fair offer” but teaching unions are pursuing a 10 per cent pay claim.
Mr Searson said: “The government says the current offer is fair but I would say to them, do they want teachers in schools in the future? A lot of teachers who have 10, 15, 20 years’ experience are telling me they are getting out. With workload already out of control, pay has been the last straw and they are saying they just can’t cope any more.
“As desirable as it might be to get new people coming into the profession, the best way to deal with shortages is to keep the people who are already trained and doing the job. But now these figures show the government is also struggling to attract people into teaching.”
Mr Searson added: “Instead of lowering entry requirements - and looking to replace subject specialists in lower secondary with generalists - why don’t they just address the issue of teacher pay?”
A Scottish government spokesperson said: “We recognise that some courses are struggling to attract sufficient applicants and we are working with universities, the General Teaching Council for Scotland and the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland on this issue.
“Since the start of the pandemic, we have provided £240 million of additional investment over the past two financial years, specifically for the recruitment of more education staff, and a further £145.5 million of permanent funding from April 2022.”
The spokesperson added: “We now have more teachers than at any time since 2008, and the ratio of pupils to teachers is at its lowest since 2009. The number of teachers per 100,000 pupils is 7,703 in Scotland compared to 5,734 in England and 5,636 in Wales.”
