“It’s a bit of a lottery,” says Kevin Ryalls, who joined the modern languages department of Linlathen High, Dundee, in August, because Tayside offered him support in adding German to his teaching qualification in French. He trained at the Jordanhill campus of Strathclyde University, where he spent most of the third term finding out about jobs.

“Jordanhill doesn’t prepare you for actually finding a job,” he says. “Basically you have to apply to one region, and that means cutting yourself off from all the rest.”

Some regions grade students on the strength of a 10-minute interview. “If you don’t score well, you’ve blown it,” he says.

Job-seeking apart, how well does teacher training prepare students for the reality of school life? Realistic, practical and school-based training is after all the goal towards which a sceptical Government has been pushing the teacher education and training institutions for some years now.

Susan Lambert, now in her first year of teaching maths and computing at Queensferry High, Lothian, enjoyed her year at Moray House Institute, Heriot-Watt University, and says she found the lectures rather than the teaching practice the most useful. Teaching practice, she feels, gives the student a false sense of security.

“You don’t teach all day or all week, and you have plenty of time to do things. The difference here is that time is so short.” In particular, there is no time to compile the kind of lesson plans that were a feature of training. “Most of my time here is spent on planning lessons, because I’m still getting to know which resources to use and how. If I came into class without being prepared the pupils would have me for lunch.” But Susan Lambert sees a clear distinction between planning - in some cases for a whole year’s lessons - and writing lesson plans. “If I had physically to write it all down I’d get nothing done. I’d like to see Moray House structure teaching practice round a full teaching week, instead of putting you in with blinkers on.”

Kevin Ryalls, too, finds real teaching very different from his experience on placement, and smiles at the memory of writing a four-page plan for a “crit” lesson. “In school, there’s more of everything, and you are responsible, ” he says. “As a student you were concerned about crits and principal teachers’ reports, but you could focus on what you had to do. Here you’ve a million things to focus on ” On teaching practice, “pupils know you’re only a student, and treat you accordingly. But even bad classes are on your side when you’re faced with an outsider, for a crit lesson, say.”

On the college-based part of the course, says Kevin, there was too much emphasis on issues of inequality and not enough on discipline. “The lectures were well delivered, but you can never get away from the question of discipline,” he says. “You know your subject and you have ideas on how to teach it, but you only learn about discipline by making mistakes.”

He recalls GIST - General Issues and Strategies for Teaching - at college: “Bits of it were awful, and bits of it very popular. But there are times in schools when I’ve looked back to it.”

For Susan, “College opened my eyes to things like differentiation and problems that might arise in class - matters like dyslexia and epilepsy - and where you could get appropriate help, from the janitor to the head.” She rates the Moray House course high on discipline and pupil motivation.

“That’s the most important part of teaching - grasping the pupils’ attention and making sure everyone is involved and contributing.” And that is the area in which time is shortest for the teacher. In college, time was wasted on interesting but unnecessary lectures on what teaching might be like in 10 or 20 years, she says - “instead of how it is now.”

“Academically speaking,” says Susan, “the lecturers are second to none. But when they come to see you on placement, they just don’t seem to be with it. Schools have changed a lot even since I left in 1986 - the subjects are different, and so are teaching methods, the exam system, and the attitudes of pupils. Most of the lecturers seem to have been in school when the belt was still in force.”

But Susan enjoyed and benefited from college, and the same is true of Kevin: “Everybody slags Jordanhill. But it is too easy to be negative. I preferred to take what I thought would be more useful.”

Both have now taught their first term - and have found it daunting. As probationers, they are still in training, and both are in schools where they have mentors - and fellow probationers. So how supportive is the induction process?

“I could have done with more feedback,” says Susan. “I worried about my contribution to the school and how I could improve. I had to go to the principal teacher and ask if I was doing things OK.” This was in the first hectic couple of months when she was still finding her way round: “I thought I would die.”

For Kevin, too, the settling in period was absolutely shattering. “Nothing could prepare you for that,” he says, although he has had the help of his principal teacher and mentor, the deputy rector. “I spent all evening and weekends on school work - and was getting to resent the way school was taking over my life.” It is to colleagues, and experience, that he attributes his now more realistic attitude.

He also recalls a talk on stress management - but nothing else - from a probationers’ meeting organised by Tayside Region. Susan missed the Lothian equivalent because of football duties. (Both have added to their workload by undertaking extra-curricular duties.) “Could do better” has to be the verdict on the college-school-region training partnership. There is still room in the intensive PGCE (Secondary) course for the colleges to sharpen up their act. In schools, the “sink or swim” attitude to probationers will predominate as long as those charged with responsibility for induction interpret their duties reactively rather than proactively.

Employers may be right in the convenient belief that probationers learn best from one another, but one day their recruitment and induction policies must recognise that teachers are professional people, not cattle.