We have already analysed the parties’ (many) manifesto pledges that relate to education but, in this, our last issue before the Scottish Parliament elections on Thursday, we home in on one pledge that all five main parties have in common: to increase teacher numbers.
The SNP is promising 3,500 more teachers over the course of the next Parliament, the Tories and Labour 3,000 and the Greens 5,500.
On the face of it, this is positive. But the reality is that more teachers is only half the battle, as the 1,700 teachers in Scotland looking for secure work will gladly testify - and have done so, in an open letter to first minister Nicola Sturgeon in March.
These teachers have mounted a campaign because some of them have been in the job for years but are largely stuck on supply or temporary contracts.
They say they have colleagues who have left teaching owing to “the casualisation of the workforce”, while those who remain find themselves unable to commit to long-term plans, such as buying a house or starting a family, with any great confidence in their future finances. That is why the Lib Dem promise of a job for every qualified teacher is closer to the reality of the situation because, ultimately, we don’t just need more teachers: we need more jobs.
At the moment, that piece of the puzzle is missing and, last week, at an online election hustings organised by the EIS teaching union, it led to heated debate among the education spokespersons from the five main parties.
The SNP’s John Swinney insisted that councils had certainty over funding - his party had promised to invest £1 billion in the Scottish Attainment Challenge over the next five years and there was, therefore, “frankly, no good reason why permanent contracts have not been released”.
But Labour’s education spokesperson, Michael Marra - who is currently a councillor in Dundee but is running to become an MSP for north-east Scotland - said the government was giving with one hand but taking away with the other. There was money for the Attainment Challenge but council budgets were being cut “year on year”.
Ultimately, Swinney committed to a full review of teacher recruitment but those of us with long enough memories know that we have been here before - and that the last review looking into this concluded that the workforce planning system was as good as it could be.
That may well be true but, every year, the student teacher recruitment targets for certain subjects - for example, maths, home economics and technical - are not hit. This means that, in some subjects, it has been many years since the requisite number of teachers have been trained for the predicted vacancies.
Equally, the recommendations made by the annual modelling exercise - which uses population projections, the pupil and teacher census and the age profile of the teacher workforce to project how many teachers we will need - are not always acted upon.
We reported in December last year its conclusion that the main postgraduate route into primary teaching may no longer be required. It said that “there will be basically no requirement for PGDE (professional graduate diploma in education) primary students from 2021 to 2027”, providing numbers on undergraduate courses are maintained, because the primary pupil roll is expected to fall between now and the end of the projection period in 2030.
However, in February, the government told the Scottish Funding Council that the 2021 intake targets for primary and secondary student teachers should remain the same as in 2020. That means, based on current demand, that in 2021-22, Scotland will train more than 1,000 primary teachers it does not actually need. Stuart Robb, head of the government’s Education Workforce Unit, said the government had decided not to reduce the target intake because “the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic may require additional teachers in the system”.
You would be hard pushed to find anyone that is going to argue with that, but, as the government is always telling us when it comes under fire over teacher recruitment, it is not the employer - councils are.
The key question, then, is not how many teachers the political parties are promising to deliver over the course of the next Parliament but exactly how they plan to get them into schools and in front of classes.
Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith
