The role of the recruitment strategy manager (RSM), a post paid for by the Teacher Training Agency in 97 authorities, has changed, according to Barry Hancock, in charge of recruitment for Redbridge in north-east London.

Originally, it was a response to the shortages. “Now it is expanding into training and specific recruitment because the market has got a lot tighter,” he says.

Hancock says schools are now snapping up suitable students who shine on teaching practice. Combined with the increasing number of mature entrants to the profession, this means that the number of genuinely mobile candidates is reduced. So schools remote from training institutions are feeling the squeeze.

The situation has prompted Suffolk to start a training course based in primary schools around Ipswich to give it 32 new teachers every year. Next year, it will be extended by 20 places. And for secondary schools, there will be 36 teachers starting school-based training from September - in English, PE, foreign languages and design and technology.

Seamus Fox, the county’s RSM, returned last month to his native Northern Ireland to tempt some of the 1,000 new teachers it produces annually to head for East Anglia.

“Martin McGuiness told the Northern Ireland Assembly last year that only 26 per cent of new teachers are employed there,” he says. “That means 74 per cent are for export, but we are competing against the Republic, which also has recruitment problems. They can earn more money there than at home.”

John Parker, whose job it is to keep the 13,000 workforce in Essex classrooms topped up, also regrets the small supply of new teachers in his area. “We have only one training institution, Anglia Polytechnic in Chelmsford, but the Teacher Training Agency’s quota system means they can’t increase numbers.”

But he remains optimistic about the future. “The early 1990s were just as bad as now,” he says. “People forget that - and that nothing was done about it. The systems that are being put in place should have a longer-lasting effect. Another year or two and we should be over the worst.”

His colleague, Angela Hall, is also convinced that there are still a lot of people out there who want to teach.

“Why are so many people switching to supply work?” she asks. “Because they don’t have to worry about meetings, about OFSTED, about parents’ evenings and all the other things that burden teachers. There’s a lesson there for the Government.”

Hertfordshire, which reportedly had to replace 1,200 teachers from its vast workforce of 11,000 last summer, has been particularly creative in its recruitment ideas.

It runs a weekly returners’ club at its training centre at Wheathampstead for ex-teachers who are contemplating a return to the classroom. The national curriculum, the Literacy and Numeracy strategies, and computers in schools are among the topics covered.

“Mostly we are responsive to the demands of the members,” says Nuala Mason, one of the county’s recruitment team. “But there are also one-to-one sessions with advisers to help people apply for jobs, write CVs and prepare for interview.”

Carol Taylor, an RSM in West Sussex, says that most of the returners are women who have had families so if heads want to attract them to jobs, they have to be flexible about part-time work and job-sharing.

“There’s scope for development here,” she says. “Heads haven’t always been keen on job-sharing, but some of them might need to think again.”

She is concerned that there is too much emphasis on short-term results and not the long-term strategy. “The background work is what’s important - housing issues, for example - but that doesn’t get headlines.”

“We’re competing for staff in a buoyant economy so people will come in and out of the profession.”

Ms Taylor talks about the lost generation, those in their forties and fifties who are leaving teaching. She herself is a member of it: she switched to her RSM job after nine years as a deputy head in Hampshire.

But it’s not all one-way traffic. Nicky Burgoyne has been RSM in Kensington and Chelsea for 18 months but is leaving this month to go back to teaching.

“It’s much more flexible and gives me the hours I need to look after my child,” she says.