Scotland’s teaching watchdog has hit back at accusations that it is overseeing a dilution of standards in teacher education by signing off a course that will fast-track science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) teachers into the profession.

Ellen Doherty, the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s (GTCS) director of education and professional learning, said the initiative, which will place Stem teachers in the classroom six months sooner than their peers and see them paid the £22,500 salary of a probationer from the outset, was a “force for good” that would help Scotland tackle its teachers supply crisis.

The new programme, which will run from January 2018 to January 2019 at the University of Dundee, and will combine the one-year postgraduate teaching qualification with the induction year, was approved by the GTCS earlier this month.

The new route has been promoted as a way to make teaching more attractive to Stem graduates. However, the GTCS decision to approve the programme was met with scepticism from teachers and was attacked by the EIS teaching union, which said it was “strongly opposed” to any approach which placed “breakneck pace” above quality.

Protecting standards

But Ms Doherty told Tes Scotland that it was time to think differently, insisting that the new route will provide “the quality and depth required to maintain the standard” - and will “place teachers where children need them”.

“We are at the stage now where we know we have a shortage of Stem teachers. That is a fact,” she said. “We know there are people out there with degrees in Stem subjects looking for employment and to change career, and we know that at the moment there is not the facility for them to get into the system and into the classroom where children need them.

“This programme is a force for good for those who want to come into the profession and who can offer a diversity of skills, knowledge, and life experience and provide high-quality teachers for children who do not have teachers in these subjects at the moment.”

A Tes Scotland investigation published in February found that last year uptake of the most popular route into secondary teaching - the one-year postgraduate PGDE - was 16 per cent below target. Among the subject areas worst-hit were technological education, maths and computing.

This coming academic year, the secondary PGDE target has been dramatically increased, from 1,350 to 1,750. The government has argued that its 11 new routes into teaching - of which the Dundee route is one - will help universities hit the “stretching” new targets.

Professor Tim Kelly, dean of the University of Dundee’s school of education and social work, said that despite its best efforts, his organisation had failed to hit its targets on the recruitment of Stem graduates to teacher education courses for a number of years. The new route will address one of the main barriers to those graduates: a lack of an income while they study, he argued.

Professor Kelly added: “We can’t keep on taking the same approach to trying to recruit Stem graduates into teaching.”

A spokeswoman for the Scottish government said that it was pleased the Dundee programme had got GTCS accreditation, adding: “It is essential that all teacher education programmes are of the highest quality.”

@Emma_Seith