A new report published by the schools inspectorate highlights the detrimental effect teacher shortages are having on flagship Scottish government policies, saying teacher recruitment is “a national issue”.
The report - published this afternoon - comes almost exactly a week after the Scottish government celebrated the highest number of teachers working in Scottish schools this decade.
However, Education Scotland makes it clear that difficulties with recruitment of teachers are continuing to plague Scottish schools and stymying key government policies, including the move to give headteachers more say over what happens in their schools.
Local authorities have been blamed in the past for failing to give schools the freedom to appoint the best mixture of staff for their context. However, according to the report, only headteachers in a “minority” of councils felt unable to appoint staff with the right skills and experience; headteachers in the majority of councils, it says, felt “well-empowered in relation to recruitment of staff”.
Instead, a key barrier to headteachers having control over staffing, according to the inspectors, is the teacher shortage. This is affecting the ability of heads to make decisions about the teachers they appoint and the way they structure their school leadership teams, states the report.
The lack of teachers is also limiting “opportunities for collaboration for improvement, access to professional learning and the provision of flexible pathways in the curriculum”, it says.
The report adds: “The majority of local authorities have clear, effective and transparent processes and procedures for recruiting school staff. Difficulties with recruitment of staff is a concern in the majority of local authorities and this is regarded as a national issue. Staffing shortages are considered barriers to empowerment in that they limit opportunities for collaboration for improvement, access to professional learning and the provision of flexible pathways in the curriculum.”
One of the Scottish government’s key goals is to put more power and money in the hands of headteachers, who it believes are best placed to make decisions about what is best for the pupils in their schools.
The government had planned to legislate to make this happen. However, the education secretary, John Swinney, shelved his education bill in June, saying he would instead give councils a year to empower schools, without a change in the law.
Today’s report, Thematic Inspection of Readiness for Empowerment, is one of three planned as ways of monitoring council progress in taking forward the plans; it looks at improvement, curriculum, staffing and funding.
In the foreword to the report, Gayle Gorman, Scotland’s chief inspector of education, says the evidence gathered by inspectors shows “the positive steps already being taken on the journey towards empowerment”. However, she adds that, “as expected”, there was “still more to be done to realise our collective ambition of an empowered, collaborative system”.
The next two thematic inspections - looking at curriculum leadership and parent and pupil participation - will be published in 2019.
