Every secondary school in Aberdeenshire is affected by teacher shortage, according to the council’s director of education and children’s services, Laurence Findlay.
He said it used to be the case that acute teacher shortage affected mostly schools in the north of the authority area, such as in Fraserburgh, Peterhead and Banff, but now these challenges are “widespread”.
“Every secondary will have several vacancies in a range of different subject areas,” he said.
In an interview with Tes Scotland, Mr Findlay praised the authority’s school leaders for the innovative solutions they have put in place to keep learning going.
However, a survey of all the authority’s secondary schools has laid bare the challenges they face and the impact of teacher shortage on the curriculum.
One secondary school in Aberdeenshire, the survey shows, is operating with more than 12 unfilled teaching posts.
That secondary reported being down two maths teachers, two home economics teachers, two technological education teachers, an English teacher, a drama teacher, a biology teacher, a chemistry teacher, an additional support for learning teacher and a part-time modern languages teacher.
Teacher shortage: schools unable to recruit
Schools in the authority reported advertising numerous times for staff but still being unable to recruit.
One head said: “We advertise teaching posts many times, frequently with no applicants or only one or two.”
Another headteacher said his school had advertised “up to six times” a year for two years for design and technology teachers but had been unable to recruit.
The knock-on affects of the shortage are wide-ranging, with some subjects being watered down or disappearing from the curriculum altogether because schools simply cannot get teachers.
One head reported: “Home economics is currently removed from curriculum.”
To avoid removing subjects, headteachers have reported that them and their senior management teams have increasingly been delivering lessons themselves.
Schools have also been using “non-specialist teachers” to deliver certain subjects: one school said it was using science teachers to “deliver a range of maths classes up to and including N5 [National 5]”.
Specialist teachers in shortage subjects were often used on a rota basis so that all students got some access.
Primary teachers plug the gaps
Primary teachers were also being used to plug gaps in English and maths, in particular.
One head said his school employed a primary teacher to deliver maths in the broad general education “as we could not fill the posts from a purely secondary perspective”.
Another said their school “may consider” a primary teacher for a maths teacher post “if we do not get a suitable candidate”.
A third headteacher said two primary teachers were working as literacy and numeracy teachers in their school, covering maths and English lessons in S1 and S2.
Some heads reported that these changes, born of necessity, were having positive effects - a school that recruited a primary teacher to deliver literacy after being unable to recruit an English teacher said the appointment was “working well in terms of transition”.
However, the EIS teaching union told Tes Scotland that it “does not believe that the current age range-specific training, qualifications and registration are interchangeable between sectors, and it would not be in the interests of the learners or teachers for them to be so”.
‘Deeply concerning’
Anne Keenan, the EIS’s assistant secretary for education and equality, described teacher shortages in secondary as “deeply concerning”.
She said students deserved “to be taught by teachers who have the requisite knowledge in the subject specialism and who have received initial teacher education in accordance with the sector in which they will teach”.
Mr Findlay raised Aberdeenshire’s secondary teacher recruitment woes with education secretary Jenny Gilruth last week at the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland conference in Cumbernauld.
He said certain secondaries were “adapting their curricula on a weekly basis” due to shortages. He added that colleagues at the University of Aberdeen had told him that just four students had joined the university’s one-year postgraduate secondary teacher education course for modern languages this year. Usually, he said, it would train around 20 secondary languages teachers via this route.
He asked Ms Gilruth how the country could ensure that it has a secondary teacher workforce fit for the future?
Teachers ‘less willing to travel’
Ms Gilruth described the University of Aberdeen figures as “concerning”.
She said that in the wake of the pandemic, she thought that teachers had become less willing to travel.
Ms Gilruth, who worked as a teacher herself, also said the government had “a bit of responsibility” to take for that because during the pandemic, in 2020-21, it had guaranteed new teachers - just out of probation - a job.
“It was never the case you got a job after the probationary year - you always had to get up and move. And I think there’s an expectation now ‘I’ll get a job down the road’,” she said.
Ms Gilruth said that more needed to be done “to incentivise people” to go to other parts of the country, but that another issue was getting people to stay in those areas “beyond probation”. She suggested there could be lessons to learn from Norway, which obliged new teachers to stay in the system for four years after qualifying.
“Given we are providing that investment in somebody, we also need to think about how we get that investment back in the system,” she said.
Speaking to Tes Scotland, Mr Findlay said he believed the solution to teacher shortage lay in local authorities, teacher education providers and the General Teaching Council for Scotland working together in partnership.
“Something needs to be done,” he said.
He added that when probationers indicated they were willing to work anywhere in Scotland, they should not be assigned schools in the Central Belt.
In Scotland new teachers are guaranteed a job for a year after they leave university in order to complete their probation. If they agree to work in any authority, they receive a payment of £8,000 if they work in secondary and £6,000 if they work in primary.
Figures released by the Scottish government in response to a freedom of information request show that last year 254 probationers agreed to be placed anywhere in the country. However, the figures also show that some of these probationers received the payments but ended up in Edinburgh (two), East and West Lothian (14), Midlothian (two), North and South Lanarkshire (nine), Renfrewshire (one), West Dunbartonshire (one) and Inverclyde (four).
In 2022-23 Aberdeenshire received 12 probationers through the preference waiver scheme.
