Exclusive: The Ministry of Defence is to abandon controversial schools� recruitment visits by armed forces presentation teams from this summer, The Herald can reveal.

THE Ministry of Defence is to abandon controversial schools' recruitment visits by armed forces presentation teams from this summer, The Herald can reveal.

The five tri-service teams who last year visited 490 UK secondary schools - including 153 in Scotland - to extol the attractions of a military career, are to be disbanded at the end of July.

The move, which will save £1.5m a year, follows claims that the military was "targeting" secondaries in deprived areas in an attempt to persuade 16-year-olds with few qualifications or job prospects to enlist.

But the ministry plans to replace the high-profile visits with pre-packaged e-learning lesson modules and a "Defence Dynamics" website in a bid to reach an even wider potential audience among 14 to 16-year-olds.

The SNP's Christine Grahame, MSP for the South of Scotland, obtained figures last May under the Freedom of Information Act showing that the number of visits north of the border increased from 14 in 2003-04 to 153 in 2005-06.

She described this as "desperation" on the part of a military which could not fill its ranks with older volunteers and called for a ban on military recruitment of teenagers still at school.

Ms Grahame cited the example of 14 visits to Govan High School in Glasgow in two years as proof that deprived, inner-city areas were being targeted.

Four other Scottish schools which received five or more promotional visits in 2005-06 - Knightswood, Whitehill and Lochend secondaries and Bannerman High - were also in Glasgow.

The new £200,000 electronic programme is a 10-year project containing more than 40 lesson-plans and audio-visual packages in science, maths and English "based on scenarios that reflect the work of the MoD and the armed forces worldwide", according to officials.

A MoD spokeswoman denied that presentation team visits had been aimed at deprived areas, and added that the teams could only go to schools which had been given local authority permission to host them.

Defence Minister Derek Twigg said: "The intention is to disband the touring schools' presentation teams in July and launch the new project in September.

"The department will be, through this, maintaining its engagement with schools and switching to an approach that will enable us to reach many more children than are visited by the defence touring teams and at a significantly lower cost."

News of the development comes a week after the MoD was forced to admit that 15 "child soldiers" had been sent by mistake to fight in Iraq since 2003.

Army rules state that no young soldier can be sent on frontline duty until their 18th birthday. All 15 were 17 and four of them female. All were removed from Iraq as soon as the administrative errors came to light.

More than 14,000 trained soldiers left the Army last year and only 12,000 joined. Senior officers say the slump in recruitment is due to parental reluctance to allow their offspring to fight in unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bad publicity over bullying in training establishments such as Deepcut, low pay and poor accommodation.

The infantry, between 2000 and 3000 short of full strength, are paid just £14,000 a year when they leave basic training.