Meeting of the Parliament 28 May 2025
It is hard to believe, after 17 years of the present Government, that we are having this debate. We really should not be, but here we are. Let us not beat about the bush, cabinet secretary: there is a crisis in teaching in Scotland. On one hand, we are short of teachers in key subject areas, such as STEM and modern languages; on the other hand, we have an oversupply of teachers in primary schools. How can we reconcile that? I have not heard a single word of admission of the problem from members on the front benches. That is not a staffing issue, and it is not a council issue; it is a planning failure, it is a whole-system failure and it is absolutely a Government failure.
Let us look at the facts. In 2024, there were 631 fewer teachers than just one year prior to that. Since 2008, the number of maths teachers has gone down by 12 per cent in Scotland, the number of physics teachers is down by 8 per cent and the number of computing science teachers is down by—wait for it—25 per cent. Every year, STEM recruitment targets are missed, while hundreds and hundreds of fully trained, good primary school teachers are unemployed.
Let us take Glasgow as an example. In 2017, 73 per cent of primary school teachers went straight from probation into a permanent job. By 2023, guess what the number was? It was 10 per cent: just 10 per cent went into a permanent job. Jenny Gilruth says that our teachers in Scotland are the best paid in the United Kingdom. That is all very well and good, but you need a job to be well paid. That is the problem that we are trying to raise this afternoon. The cabinet secretary says that she has sympathy for those primary school teachers. I have sympathy for them, too. However, they do not want sympathy; they just want a permanent job. It is as simple as that.
What effect does all that have on pupils, more importantly? Multilevel teaching has increased dramatically. According to one study in Dundee, 40 per cent of classes had multilevel teaching at one point. That is an absolute disgrace. According to the University of Stirling, there has been a clear
“reduction in the number of subjects”
offered under the present Government.
Enlighten has told us that
“one in eight of all secondary pupils ... attend a secondary school with no qualified computing science teacher. This rises to around 50% in rural areas”.
Every child in Scotland should have access to subjects such as maths, sciences, computing and modern languages.
We have heard of other teachers who have come to Scotland to make it their home but cannot teach due to issues with General Teaching Council qualifications. We have been talking about that for a decade in the Parliament, but we have never been able to resolve the issue.
That is not just bad for schools and for teachers; it is bad for the economy. We need those skills to be taught at the earliest possible age, so that the industries of the future—renewables, fintech, artificial intelligence and life sciences—all start in the classroom. If we have no computing science teachers today, we will have no coders tomorrow. If we have no physics teachers today, we will have no engineers tomorrow. There is a massive skills gap in Scotland, costing us hundreds of millions of pounds a year.
Here is the answer. We need smaller class sizes, we need more teachers in secondary and we need proper workforce planning in primary education, where supply equals demand and vice versa.
The context of the debate is simple. No teachers means no skills, and no skills means no economic growth. That all starts with the Government accepting some responsibility.
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