Teacher mentors should be released from the classroom for half a day each a week to help their students, according to the head of one of Scotland’s biggest schools of education.

But protected time for mentoring has been dismissed by another senior education leader as “a meaningless gesture”, owing to teacher shortages.

Rowena Arshad, dean of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Education, called for a national agreement on the amount of protected time that teachers have to mentor students, while speaking at a Scottish Parliament education committee meeting last week. The committee is carrying out an inquiry into teacher workforce planning.

After the meeting, Dr Arshad told Tes Scotland she thought that giving teachers with a student half a day per week to dedicate to mentoring would be a good starting point for discussions. This would bring students’ mentors in line with staff who mentor newly qualified teachers.

However, Dr Arshad also said there was a need for flexibility at school level. She told Tes Scotland: “People who mentor students on placement should be allocated time to do so.

“We have to move beyond the goodwill of teachers and ad hoc arrangements. Students who have allocated time with their mentors get more structured meetings with these mentors - they are not trying to mentor on the run.”

If local deals were made, the time dedicated to mentoring would vary, she said, adding: “We don’t want those discrepancies. There needs to be an agreement at national level with some flexibility in each school, but this would acknowledge it’s an important role.”

Impossible to deliver

But Laurence Findlay, director of education and social care at Moray Council, told the education committee that it would be impossible for schools to deliver on such a commitment until recruitment problems were resolved.

He said that although his local authority gave teachers time for mentoring, it was “a meaningless gesture in many ways” because there were no longer enough staff available to be released from teaching.

Last September, there were around 260 full-time and part-time teacher vacancies in primary and around 400 full-time and part-time vacancies in secondary, according to research by the Scottish government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. The teacher shortage is particularly pronounced in more remote parts of the country, such as Moray.

Five years ago, the authority had 400 supply teachers on its books but now has about 200, most of whom are tied up covering teacher absences, Mr Findlay said. And a quarter of heads’ posts are unfilled or temporary.

“Until we have radically resolved the issues that we have around recruiting teachers and supply teachers, [mentoring] will remain a challenge,” he added.

Morag Redford, chair of the Scottish Council of Deans of Education (SCDE), which represents Scotland’s university schools of education, said that headteachers would previously have covered mentors’ classes but were increasingly having to fill teaching gaps elsewhere.

“Protected time would ensure that [mentors] had the time to talk to the student, to review lessons and planning, and to discuss any issues that come up through the classroom practice,” she added.

Earlier this month, student teachers and newly qualified teachers told the Scottish Parliament’s education committee that school placements were the “highlight” of teacher education courses.

But they said that support from mentors varied, even between different departments in the same school.