A GLOBAL campaign to hire hundreds of teachers is under way to address crippling classroom shortages.

Trainee teachers in Australia, Canada, Ireland and Northern Ireland - countries where they are in surplus - will be invited to apply for positions in Scotland while homegrown talent that has emigrated to lucrative tax-free jobs in Gulf States such as Dubai and Saudi Arabia will be enticed home when their contracts expire.

And in a move that underlines the prevailing recruitment crisis, retired teachers will be identified from General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) registers and urged to return to the classroom on a part-time basis.

The first step will be to target the 800 or so individuals whose registration has lapsed in the past year to find out where they have gone and whether they could be persuaded back into the profession.

Further moves have also been made to relax tough entry requirements for teaching staff from the rest of the UK which will allow those who have a proven track record in the classroom to be registered here without necessarily having a teaching qualification.

The full extent of the teacher shortage was laid bare last year when it emerged there were 730 unfilled vacancies across 27 of Scotland’s 32 council areas.

Ken Muir, chief executive of the GTCS, said the ambitious global search for teachers was designed to provide a rapid and effective solution to the current recruitment problems.

He said: “All of these measures and initiatives are designed to try and get teachers into the classroom as quickly as possible to address some of the shortages we have been experiencing.

“We are looking at spreading the net as widely as possible to find out where teachers who were trained in Scotland, but are no longer working here are and whether we can get them back working in Scottish schools.

“It is also sensible to have a dialogue with regulatory bodies in other countries where there may be too many teachers to alert newly-qualified staff to the opportunities that exist here.

“Paramount through all of this is the importance of maintaining the very high standards of teacher professionalism in Scotland that exist and that will remain the same.”

The campaign comes after a number of councils have complained of teacher shortages, with concerns the current registration process for teachers who have been working outside Scotland is lengthy and inflexible.

In 2015, seven local authorities called for a national taskforce to halt shortages including Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Moray, the Highlands and the Western Isles.

There have also been concerns over shortages of specialist teachers in key subjects such as mathematics, physics and computing with Scottish Government targets for training places not being filled.

John Swinney, the Deputy First Minister, said the Scottish Government intended to unveil its own teacher recruitment campaign on Wednesday.

He said: “I very much welcome these efforts to recruit more teachers into Scottish classrooms and I would encourage GTCS to bring forward these changes as soon as possible.

“The Scottish Government is working closely with GTCS and universities to develop new ways to attract people into the profession, supported with £1 million from our Attainment Scotland Fund.

“This is on top of the £88 million we are investing this year alone to recruit and retain teachers across the country, including our new recruitment campaign which will launch next week.”

Last year, the GTCS introduced a new category of provisional registration that allowed skilled teachers from outside Scotland who did not necessarily have a recognised teaching qualification to top up their skills whilst working in the classroom.

Earlier this week The Royal Society of Edinburgh urged ministers to consider offering bursaries of up to £30,000 to encourage top science graduates into teaching amid concern over shortages in so-called Stem subjects such as physics, chemistry and mathematics. Last year, the Scottish Government announced students on Stem teacher training courses could be fast-tracked to help deal with shortages.