Here’s a question for you: what happens when a teaching post goes unfilled? It’s a story that will be familiar to many.
Is the job simply advertised until someone does apply? Or are both the post - and the subject it’s for - quietly discarded? Teachers discussing the staff shortage in Scotland on the Tes online community forums say that, alarmingly, it’s the latter.
They’ve accused the Scottish government of “obscuring the truth” about the level of vacancies in schools, and have claimed that subjects with no teachers to teach them - including home economics, computing and technology education - are falling off school timetables.
In early December, Scottish government figures on teacher vacancies revealed that there had been a “significant reduction in jobs advertised for more than three months”, compared with the previous year.
Yet, teachers were quick to point out a deeper truth. One said: “Some of these subjects are discreetly removed and will go below the radar. In my place, we can’t get home economics teachers after three of them retired, so the subject is effectively being removed from the timetable - other subjects get an increase in time instead.”
Another teacher said their school had found it impossible to recruit technology education teachers, so the subject was removed and now “pupils get an extra period of another subject”.
The teacher added that “[education secretary] John Swinney then says there are no unfilled vacancies at school X”.
Limited interest in the posts, the teachers explained, stemmed from the “lack of a decent wage and worsening conditions”, which made teaching a “very unattractive proposition”. The force of this feeling is evident in the continuing pay negotiations between teachers and local authorities’ body Cosla.
The Scottish government says that, wherever possible, schools should ensure that pupils can choose their preferred subjects. If this isn’t feasible, national guidelines are supposed to encourage flexibility so that schools can collaborate with each other.
* This article originally appeared in the 25 January 2019 issue under the headline “Recruitment crisis slams the door on subject choice”
