“It’s a pretty grim business,” says headteacher Gavin Clark, when talking about the teacher recruitment crisis.
His school - Preston Lodge High in East Lothian - advertised for 2.5 maths teacher posts last month and ended up recruiting one teacher. The jobs attracted four applications, but only one came from a qualified teacher.
Managing to secure one maths teacher was “something of a relief”, says Mr Clark, who was recently forced to cut his computing department from two teachers to one after four adverts failed to deliver.
The school has readvertised the remaining maths teacher posts. The advert closes on Sunday. In the meantime, Preston Lodge pupils and staff have made a video about the school’s maths department in a bid to generate more interest (bit.ly/PrestonLodgeMaths).
However, until their efforts reap rewards, it is “all hands to the pump”, says Mr Clark.
The timetable has been “completely adjusted”, staff from across the school are taking junior maths classes and depute head and maths teacher Calum Stewart is increasingly finding himself back in the classroom.
Other consequences are that requests for part-time working from maths teachers have had to be turned down - the school lost one member of the maths department because of this - and personal development opportunities for maths staff have been curtailed because maths teachers are needed in front of classes.
Mr Clark welcomes education secretary John Swinney’s announcement about bursaries for would-be maths teachers, but he’s clear what the issue is: pay. He is calling for “a significant uplift in pay” so schools can compete for science, technology, maths and engineering (Stem) graduates.
“The maths teacher shortage is significant,” says Mr Clark, “and although the Scottish government bursaries are a positive step, they will not solve the immediate crisis.”
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, president of secondary headteachers’ association SLS, told Tes Scotland that the only way schools could appoint a maths teacher was “by ‘robbing’ another school and creating the same problem for them”. He echoed Mr Clark’s call for the issue of pay to be addressed, adding that promotional opportunities for teachers also needed to be improved.
Missed targets
For the past two years, targets for maths trainees have not been hit by universities. Last year 179 were sought for PGDEs and 128 recruited. The year before 146 maths teachers were sought and 76 recruited.
Maths teacher Chris Smith - who publishes a free weekly maths newsletter with 2,300 subscribers - said if the government wanted “to crack not only the recruitment crisis but the retention dilemma, too” it had to look at improving pay.
Earlier this year Blairgowrie High was forced to take the “highly unusual” step of asking parents to help support pupils in maths lessons. Edinburgh’s Trinity Academy also appealed to parents for help last month, when it was unable to recruit two maths teachers. The advert for those jobs closes a week today.
Back in East Lothian, Preston Lodge pupils appeal to potential maths teachers by talking about the benefits of learning the subject in a different environment, thanks to the school’s overnight “maths camp”, and of using Google Classroom and online-learning resources such as Mathletics to improve their skills.
Mr Clark concludes: “What I’d like to be able to say is, ‘We’ll give you full-time pay for part-time hours’ - we need radical solutions.”
A Scottish government spokeswoman said teacher recruitment was a matter for local authorities but it recognised that “recruitment challenges remain” and had taken “decisive action”, including a recruitment campaign, the deal with councils to maintain teacher numbers and the new bursaries.
