Endless aisles of yoghurt, walls of washing powder and an assault course of salty snacks to negotiate: the huge amount of choice in your average British supermarket can make shopping a bewildering ordeal.

Factor into this the potential humiliation of trying to use the self-checkout, and it’s enough to make you go running to the farmers’ market with a hemp bag-for-life.

But choice and diversity, we are told repeatedly, are good things. In education, “one size fits all” is rarely now thought of as a desirable approach, despite its apparent convenience and allusion to equality.

Curriculum for Excellence drives this idea home and “personalisation and choice”, the Scottish government says, is one of its core principles.

But until now, the teacher training system in Scotland has been very uniform. There are only really two routes into the profession for natives - the undergraduate route and the postgraduate. Only recently did Scotland make it a little easier for those teachers who qualified in England to convert their qualifications, too.

This has served us well, but now shortages loom, and the government is actively looking for solutions. Risking opprobrium from the unions, John Swinney has asked universities to come up with a range of alternative routes, including a fast-track option, which will allow teachers to become qualified in one year instead of two.

It is true that teacher training in Scotland may currently lack the excitement of England’s veritable buffet of choices, but ministers must tread carefully. As with a supermarket trip, choice isn’t always a good thing.

The Tory government in England has stressed that it wants to put the focus on classroom-based routes, allowing individual schools to “grow their own” with the support of a university.

For some schools, this makes sense, and gets teachers on the ground more quickly.

But the fragmentation of the system has been criticised for creating a system that lacks coherence and inhibits national planning for teacher supply. The National Audit Office said recently that that the range of routes in England was “confusing” for potential new recruits.

Teach First - a scheme that has been successful in making teaching an attractive option for top graduates, has been well-received by the schools that it works with.

But the drop-out rate of 60 per cent, 20 per cent higher than the average for other routes, suggests that such schemes will never be the solution to the recruitment crisis.

The diversity of routes in England has helped career changers and other staff with less traditional academic backgrounds join the profession.

But the jury is very much out on whether the current system has helped solve overall shortages, and England has missed its targets for teacher trainee recruitment for the past four years.

Importantly, anything that gives the impression that it is “easier” to become a teacher has the danger of sending out the wrong message and potentially lowering the status of the profession.

Unions say shortages can be addressed only by making teaching a more attractive profession, with status, fair pay and reasonable working hours.

Fiddling around the edges, with fledgling schemes to speed up recruitment, will never tackle the big picture.

While using the self-checkout in the supermarket may save time in the short term, Scottish ministers are highly likely to end up with an unexpected item in the bagging area.

@irenabarker

This is an article from the 29 July edition of TESS. This week’s TESS magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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