SCOTLAND’S teacher shortage is being compounded by red tape stopping people trained outside the country being “fast-tracked” into the classroom, Ruth Davidson has claimed.
The Scottish Conservative leader said a requirement for even senior teachers from outside Scotland to undergo a year’s probationary teaching on basic pay was “ridiculous”.
However Ms Davidson also stumbled badly at First Minister’s Questions, muddling up teacher numbers and appearing not to know the details of the scheme involved.
All teachers in Scotland must register with the General Teaching Council for Scotland, which can rule out some applicants from the rest of the UK who lack the right qualifications.
However to help plug vacancies - now at 700 across Scotland - teachers have been able to apply since 2016 for “provisional conditional" registration, letting them teach as they train.
The catch is that even highly qualified teachers may get a probationer wage of £22,000.
A report this month from Holyrood’s education committee said some teachers were “unable or unwilling” to relocate to Scotland because of this probation year.
At FMQs, Ms Davidson said recent reports had exposed acute teacher shortages in Edinburgh and Perth, and asked Nicola Sturgeon the full extent of the problem.
The First Minister said the vacancy rate was just over 1 per cent but set to decline soon.
“We are taking a range of actions to deal with and address it,” she said, listing more probationer teachers, more student teachers, and a recruitment drive outside Scotland.
She then added: “The biggest threat to all the action that we are taking is, of course, the restrictions that Ruth Davidson’s party wants to put on the ability of people teachers, nurses and doctors to come to this country from other parts of Europe.”
Ms Davidson replied: “From a Government that cut 4,000 teaching posts before Brexit even happened, that is the most pathetic excuse that I have ever heard.”
Calling for teachers trained outside Scotland to be fast-tracked into schools, Ms Davidson raised the example of a man who had been told to "go back to school" and retrain before taking a teaching post, despite having been a maths teacher in England for 15 years.
She said: “We have a crippling shortage of teachers. We have been asking for years for the system to be speeded up to help, so why has there been a delay in implementing that?”
Ms Sturgeon said she knew of the case, and was “gobsmacked” Ms Davidson didn’t know of the provisional system that let teachers train on the job.
She said: “Ruth Davidson asks me why we have not fixed the situation. I am afraid that the answer is that we have - she just didn't bother to do the research to find that out.”
Ms Davidson accused the First Minister of “smoke and mirrors” and wanting “a herogram for only now beginning to try to fix what has been going on for years”.
Ms Sturgeon said: “We always know when Ruth Davidson has lost the plot at First Minister’s question time, because we just get the angry waffling in place of a question.”
LibDem leader Willie Rennie called for a new pay deal for teachers similar to the lucrative settlement following the Mc Crone report in the early years of devolution.
Ms Sturgeon said it would be wrong “to embark on a review that could take years”, and she would stick with training more student teachers and giving heads more power and resources.
Ms Davidson said later: “It’s not good enough for Nicola Sturgeon to point to changes made a few years back – we know they don’t go far enough. Children only get one chance at their education.”
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