A Scottish teaching union is calling for the inspectorate to ensure that schools have appropriately qualified teachers delivering lessons, warning that headteachers and councils are blurring teacher registration categories in order to fill vacancies.
Seamus Searson, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, said primary teachers are increasingly filling gaps in secondary schools in shortage subjects like maths.
And secondary teachers are “delivering qualification classes who are not qualified to do so”, outside of their area of specialism, he added.
Tes Scotland can reveal that the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) has written to education directors about the issue, warning that “teachers must teach what and who they are qualified to teach”.
Teachers teaching outside their registration
In a communication sent to council education directors on 27 February and obtained by Tes Scotland, GTCS chief executive Dr Pauline Stephen said it is “fundamental to ensure that teachers are qualified for the work they do” and that if they want to teach beyond their category of registration, they “must gain the relevant further category of registration”.
In Scotland teachers can be registered in four categories: primary education, secondary (subject) education, further education and additional support needs.
Dr Stephen wrote that a registration category matters because “it tells our communities, the profession and learners what a teacher is qualified to teach”.
She said registration is also “essential to teaching being a trusted profession and is the very reason that GTC Scotland was established in 1965”.
The changes in the way that Scottish teachers are being deployed have come as a result of teacher shortages, which are particularly acute in some secondary subject areas and in more remote and rural parts of the country.
For a number of years teacher education recruitment targets for the one-year postgraduate course, the PGDE - the most popular route into secondary teaching - have not been hit.
In 2023-24 just half of places on the PGDE were taken overall, but for hard-to-fill subjects like maths, computing and technological education, under-recruitment was more acute.
Education directors have been frank about the challenges they face securing secondary staff for some subjects.
Laurence Findlay, Aberdeenshire Council’s director of education and children’s services and president of directors’ association ADES, told Tes Scotland in an exclusive interview, published in February, that a “significant number” of Aberdeenshire secondary schools now employ primary teachers to teach literacy and numeracy in S1-3.
He said there were “real examples of success” from this crossover between sectors but such moves had been born of necessity: the council simply cannot get enough English and maths teachers. Other hard-to-recruit subjects, he said, included home economics, design and technology and the sciences.
However, Mr Searson said a “real strength” of the Scottish education system is the principle that only teachers qualified in a particular sector or subject can teach in Scottish schools.
“This is not the case in England, Northern Ireland or Wales,” he pointed out.
Mr Searson added: “Local authorities and some headteachers are more concerned about filling vacancies and blur the GTCS registration categories - not only when it comes to primary teachers working in secondary schools but also secondary teachers delivering qualification classes who are not qualified to do so.
“This undermines the GTCS as the regulator of the profession. The employers are undermining the GTCS every time they fill a gap with a teacher who is not competent to teach in the sector or in the subject.
“We believe that the inspectorate should ensure that schools have appropriately qualified teachers when conducting inspections. Parents will not be happy if they find out that their children are being taught by teachers not qualified to do so.”
An Education Scotland spokesperson said inspectors do not currently gather information relating to the number of primary teachers employed in secondary schools.
The key focus of inspection was “the quality of teaching and learning”, they said, and if there were concerns these were reported clearly.
The spokesperson said the inspectorate’s recent report on enhancing mathematics education noted that “a shortage of specialised mathematics teachers” was impacting “on the consistency of learning and teaching”.
“In our reporting we were clear that ensuring that children and young people are taught by qualified and confident mathematics teachers is critical to improving educational outcomes,” they said.
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