Hansard

Presiding Officer,

“I find myself ill with worry of how I will pay my bills. My car is broken but I cannot afford to fix it. My rent is £1000 but I cannot get a mortgage due to uncertainty of work. I lost my mum in the first term of becoming a teacher so have no other way of supporting myself. I cannot even gain money from universal credit as casually working supply … means I cannot claim anything.”

Those are the words of just one of the many teachers who are crying out for this Government to listen to their battle to do the job that they love—to educate young minds. I hear stark reports of 170 applications for one temporary position; of lives being on hold; of teachers being unable to start their family, get a house and settle down; of older teachers having sacrificed careers in industry for nothing; of teachers leaving the country for work; and of thousands leaving the profession. The problem is most acute in primary education.

In her amendment, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills blames local authorities. She says that they are the employers and they are responsible for local workforce planning, but councils are not responsible for the supply of new teachers. That is the job, through universities, of central Government.

Let me take members back to the previous election, when the Scottish National Party promised to cut teacher contact time by 90 minutes per week. It then promised to create 3,500 extra teachers to make that possible, so universities got busy educating them. When the councils could not afford to recruit those extra teachers, there were few jobs for them. The Government failed to reach an agreement to cut teacher contact time, but the newly qualified teachers kept on coming. The Government then worked out that, with falling school rolls, it did not need 3,500 extra teachers to cut the 90 minutes, but it kept the new teachers coming.

Just one in four newly qualified teachers now finds a permanent teaching post. The Government’s working group admits that there are now 950 more primary teachers than jobs available. The result is that 950 teachers—plus many more with short-term jobs, zero-hours jobs or no job at all—are struggling to pay the bills and battling to stay in teaching, with the Government pretending that it has nothing to do with it.

The Government is failing to cut teacher contact time by 90 minutes and failing to deliver jobs for 3,500 extra teachers. It is failing teachers and pupils. Even today, the cabinet secretary points to others rather than accepting that this mess is of the Government’s making. When she stands up in a moment, the first words that she should utter are: “I am sorry”. She should apologise to all those unemployed and underemployed teachers.

The next tasks are to solve the 90-minute teacher contact time promise and the shambles of the 3,500 extra teachers, and to give clear guidance to the teacher workforce planning advisory group.

Although there are too many teachers in one part of the system, there are not enough in another. An example is secondary schools in Aberdeenshire. The cabinet secretary knows, because she visited Aberdeenshire not so long ago, that it is short of science teachers, maths teachers, technical teachers and home economics teachers. Claire Rennie—no relation—from Fraserburgh academy parent council says:

“While this has been an issue for many years, it is now very much at crisis point.”

In the 2022-23 session, Aberdeenshire Council requested 48 newly qualified secondary teachers, but it was allocated only 25. It got worse, as only 16 arrived—a third of what the council asked for. In the following year, 66 were requested, only 18 were allocated and just 12 started—a fifth of what was needed. Almost none arrived where the council has the biggest shortages. The effects of that are subjects being cut out in schools, primary teachers being brought into secondary schools, falling staff morale and declining pupil behaviour.

The problem is nationwide. Compared with when the Scottish National Party came to power, there are 363 fewer maths teachers, 91 fewer physics teachers, 216 fewer computer science teachers and 180 fewer technical education teachers. The number of modern languages teachers has fallen by more than a fifth.

What are the solutions? The cash incentives are clearly not working. The teaching bursary of £20,000 for science, technology, engineering and mathematics and for Gaelic has a poor take-up rate. The preference waiver payment for teachers to move to areas in which it is hard to recruit is not working, either. Those payments must be revamped. We need to look at where new teachers are trained, because they often remain in those areas to teach.