Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, at a primary school in Wester Hailes, Edinburgh.
Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, at a primary school in Wester Hailes, Edinburgh. Photograph: Lisa Ferguson/The Scotsman/PA
Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, at a primary school in Wester Hailes, Edinburgh. Photograph: Lisa Ferguson/The Scotsman/PA

Northern Scotland suffering teacher shortage with 300 posts unfilled

This article is more than 8 years old

Severest shortages are in Aberdeenshire and the Highlands where 20 primary schools are without head teachers, and nearly 190 teaching posts remain vacant

Council leaders across northern Scotland have called for urgent action to deal with a shortage of teachers after failing to fill nearly 300 teaching and head teacher posts.

The severest shortages are in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and the Highlands where councils now have 20 primary schools without head teachers and nearly 190 teaching posts vacant in primary and secondary schools.

The shortages are at their worst in Aberdeen city, where a fifth of its primary schools have no permanent head and 50 teacher posts are unfilled. That was despite repeated efforts to boost recruitment with “golden hellos” for new teachers worth £5,000, recruitment drives in Ireland and Canada, and low-cost flats in the city reserved for teachers.

Council leaders in those three authorities and three others, Moray, Orkney and Shetland, announced on Wednesday that they planned to hold a summit in October to review possible solutions, including making it smoother and easier for overseas teachers to satisfy Scotland’s strict qualifications rules.

Scotland’s main teachers’ union, the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), is considering balloting its members on industrial action following inconclusive talks over a new pay deal.

Jenny Laing, the leader of Aberdeen city council, said its difficulties and those in Aberdeenshire generally stemmed from the high housing costs linked to its booming oil and engineering industries pushing up house values across the region.

The attractiveness of oil industry salaries made it much harder to recruit science, engineering and maths graduates to teaching, worsening teacher shortages in those “Stem” subjects and affecting most of the Aberdeenshire area, Laing said.

The Highlands council has faced problems recruiting teachers because of the remoteness of some locations. Aberdeen’s fears were exacerbated by forecasts that its primary school pupil numbers are due to rise by a third by 2022 and by 16% in high schools.

Laing said Aberdeen city council had hired 28 teachers from Ireland over the past two years and two from Canada, but was failing to keep pace with existing vacancies, let alone future gaps in staffing. Aberdeen’s recruitment drives were being funded from its central education budget, while its funding from the Scottish government was being frozen, cutting its available money for day to day teaching in schools.

“We have a serious issue here and we can only say that it will be worse if we don’t take positive action in order to try to address this,” Laing said.

The Scottish government said it would attend the councils’ summit, insisting it had already proven it was committed to helping councils recruit teachers by giving them £51m to recruit and retain staff and targeting money at teacher training courses in Aberdeen and the Highlands.

“We are committed to ensuring schools have the right number of teachers with the right skills,” a spokeswoman said. “We welcome the opportunity to engage with local authorities to discuss potential further action to address the issue of teacher recruitment.”

But Laing said that £51m was tied to tough Scottish government targets for every council to employ exactly the same number of teachers as last year or face having money clawed back, even if the problems with recruitment were beyond their control. “We don’t need threats from the Scottish government; we need help to address not just the immediate problems we have but the long-term ones as well,” she said.

Larry Flanagan, the EIS’s general secretary, said: “Attracting teachers to some parts of the country – for example, rural or remote areas or areas with a lack of affordable housing – is an ongoing challenge for a number local authorities.”

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed