The new year is a time for taking stock and rebooting. As we draw back from the confusing detail of our daily lives, the big picture slowly starts to re-emerge.

At least, that’s what we hope will happen with those who hold sway over Scottish education. For all the swirling arguments about different approaches to school governance, pedagogy, qualifications and curricular structures, there is a simple truth blighting it: many schools in Scotland just don’t have enough teachers.

There are ominous signs around the country. Headteachers increasingly find themselves plugging gaps in the classroom when they are supposed to be guiding schools through a period of breakneck change. Last month, Moray Council warned that a lack of teachers might result in pupils going to school part-time. Some subjects - home economics is mentioned to us more than any other - are disappearing from schools after fruitless efforts to advertise jobs several times.

Meanwhile, local budgets are in crisis, with dire prediction being made for the impact on education. Yes, councils have been saying this for years, but it appears that we have genuinely reached a tipping point.

More than a decade ago, in a time of relative plenty, I used to cover local government for The Press and Journal. When budgetary concerns cropped up, you’d sometimes hear people ask why a council couldn’t just dip into its reserves. Officials would smile knowingly at the naivety of the questioner and explain that this was rainy day money - but that it was never likely to rain hard enough that we’d need it.

‘A financial precipice’

That attitude is the stuff of misty-eyed nostalgia now, with council leaders routinely warning that we “are standing on the edge of a financial precipice”. That is how a consultation document on budget savings puts it in Moray - an authority that forecasts all its reserves will be used up by March 2019.

Five days before Christmas, education secretary John Swinney was grilled by the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee. He argued that teacher numbers were going in the right direction, highlighting that levels were at their highest point since 2011 and that probationers more likely to find work than ever. However, that was offset, he conceded, by more teachers than expected having left the profession of late.

Swinney, whatever one thinks of what he has done in response, at least recognises that teacher recruitment and retention levels unavoidably affect the daily experience of being a teacher: moves to reduce workload and increase pay, he said, “come from my appreciation of the fact that it has been very tough for people over the past few years, which has affected the willingness of teachers to be in the profession”.

But the numbers still don’t add up. Swinney told the committee that the government had planned for 4,058 new student teachers in 2017-18, but managed to recruit only 3,657. The opening of various new routes into the profession only bumped that figure up to 3,861.

Next month, many of Scotland’s 32 councils will set their annual budgets - and as South Ayrshire put it, this will be where the situation “really does start to bite”. Education leaders have already warned that their sector can no longer expect the special protection that it has often had in the past, so it seems inevitable that the job of a being a teacher will only come under more pressure.

This all has the makings of a perfect storm - and who knows what education will look like when it comes out the other side.

@Henry_Hepburn