THE number of primary school teachers being trained in Scotland could be cut despite a recruitment crisis.

The Scottish Government is planning to reduce the number of trainees in 2018/19 because pupils numbers are set to stabilise after recent increases.

The move means training places on the one year Professional Graduate Diploma in Education could drop from 1,186 in 2017/18 to 450 the following year.

The Scottish Government said the figures were only projections and did not reflect the actual targets which would be set later.

However, critics have highlighted the current difficulties schools have in securing staff.

Universities who train teachers also warned they face significant planning difficulties because of the sharply fluctuating numbers from year to year.

John Stodter, general secretary of Ades, which represents council education directors, said councils were still struggling to fill vacancies in both both primary and secondary.

And Maureen McKenna, Glasgow’s education director, said demand for primary staff was likely to increase because of new money being given direct to schools under the Scottish Government’s pupil equity fund.

She said: “The fund has seen £120m flow into schools and any schools with a decent share of that will want to buy teachers.”

Donald Gillies, head of the school of education at the university of the West of Scotland, warned that the “wild fluctuations” encouraged institutions to employ staff on short-term contracts “which is not what teacher education needs and not what professionals should face”.

Edinburgh University said it wanted to move away from the current system of changing annual targets to a longer-term planning model.

A Scottish Government spokesman told the Times Educational Supplement Scotland: “These are statistics from the teacher workforce planning tool which are used as a starting point for discussions with the Teacher Workforce planning Advisory Group when agreeing required teacher training numbers.

“This group will also consider other factors such as the teacher census, local demand, the number of teachers leaving or returning to the profession and the number of students not completing their courses.”

Meanwhile, councils have unveiled a new scheme aimed at tackling the crisis in supply teaching.

Under the move councils will have access to an online database of supply staff which will allow them a bigger pool of potential candidates.

Local authority umbrella body Cosla said the move was a positive step which would help ease problems, but teaching unions said a bigger issue was lack of numbers.