There is at present a schizophrenic quality about the teacher supply debate. It looks as if the colleges of education will have a few headaches next year coping with the increased intake of graduates and finding them adequate facilities for school experience. But right now, there are still schools such as Glasgow’s Riverside where shortages are indeed serious.
Once again we suggest that a more precise but flexible system is appropriate for the kind of rescue operation needed in such a school. There would be nothing very difficult practically - and nothing that would offend professional or association principles - in a scheme whereby a teacher was paid a handsome lump sum for having put himself - say over a period of three years - completely at the disposal of an authority so that he could be sent to any school at any time.
* Applications for secondary training at Scotland’s “big four” colleges of education are up by about 30 per cent on last year. Uncertainty of graduate employment and the crisis in Scottish industry are bringing more applicants from both graduates and people in industry and commerce.
* Women advisers in Glasgow are protesting that they have not been given what they consider is their proper share of the new appointments as assistant head teachers.
They have circulated letters to councillors and MPs saying that it might have been considered appropriate that they should have moved to the post of assistant head teacher automatically in the city.
* Mrs Elizabeth Garrett, education officer for Grampian Television, returns to teaching in the autumn - at Harlaw Academy . . . Perhaps her most noteworthy achievement at Grampian has been managing to smile cheerfully through all the inevitable remarks made about the award-winning series on sex education, Living and Growing, for which she was responsible.
TES SCOTLAND, June 11, 1971