SUNDAY HERALD INVESTIGATION: Crisis at the heart of educationBy Helen McArdle
Fewer than half of the record number of probationer teachers qualifying in Scotland this year have secured teaching posts ahead of the beginning of the new school term on Thursday and the website which most teachers check for vacancies had exactly 13 jobs across Scotland posted last week.
In a survey of all 32 local authorities conducted by the Sunday Herald last week, 19 said they had offered permanent or temporary jobs to less than half the probationer teachers they had employed; of those 10 said that the figure was less than 25%.
Only four local authorities - West Lothian, Dumfries and Galloway, Dundee and Clackmannanshire - had offered jobs to more than 50% of probationers. Clackmannanshire is unique for halving this year's intake of probationers in order to employ 5% more newly qualified teachers than it had probationers in 2007-8.
Nine local authorities were unable to give details on post-probationer recruitment.
In Glasgow, there have been no vacancies in primary schools since recruitment for the 2008-9 session began in March, and only "small-scale" recruitment for maths and English in secondary schools, with 16 and six positions becoming available respectively.
Opportunities for newly qualified teachers in the city are also hampered by the fact they are barred from joining its long-term supply list because it is capped at 125 for both primary and secondary and requires one full year's teaching experience following the compulsory induction period.
Drew Morrice, assistant secretary of the EIS, Scotland's biggest teachers' union, said: "It's a bit early to say exactly whether it will be worse this year, but I do think the indications are that it's going to be bleak."
He believes the problems have arisen, not as a result of bad planning, but because of an antagonism between central government policy and local authority reality.
Student intake for teacher training courses in Scotland is set each year by the Scottish government, based on the results of the Teacher Workforce Planning report produced by the Higher Education Funding Council. This assesses the demographic picture of the teaching profession and allocates each college a fixed number of places for primary and each subject in secondary. As a result, there should be a rough correlation between newly qualified teachers and vacant posts.
The government also sets teacher training numbers to achieve its declared aim of lowering class sizes, but it cannot force councils to implement such reductions.
"That makes the issue of workforce planning a bit more complicated and a bit more difficult to achieve," said Morrice. "Between that and budget pressures where some councils have reduced the staffing standard, cut time for managers, and in some cases failed to honour previous commitments for English and Maths in S1 and S2, then the impression we're getting is that the number of people who are able to leave their probationary year and be guaranteed permanent employment is quite limited."
A spokesman for the Scottish government said: "It's not that the teaching market is completely saturated and there are no jobs - there is movement every single month. There are always people coming out of training, people retiring, people going into jobs, and sometimes that just takes a wee bit of time to happen."
Fiona Hyslop, the Cabinet secretary for education, announced investment this summer sufficient to maintain teacher numbers at their 2007 level despite falling rolls. The government also anticipates retirement rates to continue averaging 6000 annually for the next few years, and believes this will help avert a crisis of jobless teachers.
However, a teacher employment working group has been commissioned by the Scottish government to investigate whether the current planning process is fit for purpose, and to consider the impact the Teacher Induction Scheme (TIS) has had on employment opportunities since it was implemented in 2002 following the McCrone agreement.
In April, a follow-up survey conducted by the General Teaching Council Scotland (GTCS) found that 93% of 2006-7's probationers had found teaching employment in Scotland. However, only 48% were in full-time permanent positions while 49% were on temporary or supply contracts. They will now be competing with this year's output of newly qualified teachers for a limited pool of jobs.
Labour's schools spokesman, Ken Macintosh, believes meeting targets on class sizes is the key to solving the apparent surplus of new teachers. Almost half of the new teachers who completed their probationary year in his Eastwood constituency between 2007 and 2008 are either "not in teaching" or of "unknown destination" according to the council. He said: "The whole probationer scheme is nationally led. It requires the participation, on an equal basis, of local authorities, the GTCS and so on, but it's been led by the government and funded by them.
"They are training teachers but they're getting it wrong at the other end by then not finding them jobs. They're underfunding local authorities and then washing their hands of any responsibility as these teaching posts vanish. That is the crux of the matter.
"All the SNP would need to do to resolve this crisis and anxiety for probationers would be to meet their own pledge to cut class sizes and enforce this with local authorities, or give them the money to enable cuts."
Insecurity is not a novel experience for new teachers. Before the McCrone system was introduced, teachers often spent years doing supply work after completing their training in order to accrue enough classroom experience to achieve "fully-registered" status.
Most involved in the profession believe that, despite the current difficulties, the McCrone system is an improvement. Now trainee teachers have the security of a guaranteed year's work following their degrees, becoming fully qualified much more quickly than in the past. Some newly qualified teachers must surely feel insecurity has simply been postponed.
Among the most frustrating outcomes of the scheme, according to some observers, is that Scotland is producing more teachers of a higher calibre than ever before - but risks losing their talent (and wasting millions of pounds in the process) if it can't make teaching a financially viable option.
Lynda Smith, course coordinator for Primary Studies at the University of Strathclyde, said: "Many of our students have come from other employment, have mortgages and families. Many of them are students not straight from university who have done other jobs and given them up on a conscious decision that this is what they want to do, so the level of commitment that they have is really, really high.
"We want to keep the high standard these individuals have shown going into the teaching profession. We don't want to lose them."
The risk of an exodus of talent also worries Drew Morrice from the EIS: "Covering maternity leave might be a sufficient security to embark on, but if all a council can do is offer you supply if and when', are people who have mortgages and other financial commitments going to take that risk or are they simply going to say I've entered into this, it's backfired, I'm going to do something else'?"
Entrance to postgraduate teaching courses in Scotland has more than doubled since the Teacher Induction Scheme began, coinciding with a 50% increase in graduates in the UK since the mid-1990s. For thousands, qualifying as a teacher is the culmination of six years studying - six years spent accumulating debt instead of earning a salary, gambling on a job at the end of it.
