Teacher recruitment issues can often be oversimplified by politicians. The recent revelation that some 700 posts were unfilled at the start of term is a case in point.
It is the detail of teacher vacancies which matters more than an eye-catching number.
For instance, which disciplines and areas of the country are affected and what, above all, is the impact on pupils’ education.
Earlier this year Holyrood’s Education Committee produced a report on workforce planning, to which various professional bodies are now responding.
Drawing on the day-to-day experience of those on the frontline, one of the most useful is from the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland.
ADES asked every education authority in Scotland about the impact of teacher shortages on vacancies, cuts in posts, cuts in subjects, “planned measures” to cope with the problem such as joint headships and composite classes, and “ad-hoc cover” such as managers and staff from unrelated disciplines forced to cover lessons at short notice.
The findings are summed up in the first line of the resulting report, which goes before MSPs this week: “ADES is very concerned about the current teacher shortage”.
What follows is the kind of hard detail often missing from the political knockabout. The effects of teacher shortages are as wide-ranging as they are worrying.
As we report today, ADES found shortages were forcing some schools to transfer some of the teaching burden to pupils to keep subjects on the curriculum.
There was a “reduction in the number of direct teaching periods for Advanced Higher courses” with students “expected to undertake significant amounts of self-directed study.”
In other words, pupils trying to absorb material they ought to led through by a qualified teacher.
The move to more family-friendly working hours, admirable in principle, is also exacerbating the impact of teacher shortages.
As teachers trim hours here and there, others are required to step up to fill them, but very often the extra hands are not available.
It means some councils are turning down requests for different hours, further depressing morale and risking the problem getting even worse through teachers going elsewhere.
ADES also flags a recruitment “crisis” in head teacher posts, particularly in the primary sector.
Another concern is universities urging councils more and more to accept probationers who do not meet required the standards.
This suggests a troubled profession is not getting the best students, leading to second-raters featuring more heavily among those meant to fix the shortages.
None of this is necessarily intractable. But it is clear that teacher shortages are now an entrenched, multi-layered problem that will take a great national effort to address.
Our politicians should therefore work as best they can on a cross-party basis to help that effort, and help our children in so doing.
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