SNP set to halve teacher training amid staff crisis
TRAINING time for teachers could be halved in a desperate attempt to solve spiralling school staff shortages.
The controversial move is being considered by Education Secretary John Swinney amid warnings that a lack of teachers may even force some schools to close.
He has written to teacher training chiefs asking them to come up with a range of new routes into the profession in order to tackle shortages in certain subjects.
Mr Swinney said it was ‘essential that we consider alternative routes that help address the current supply issues facing schools in many parts of the country’.
He wants universities to devise a traintrain ing route that combines the oneyear postgraduate course and oneyear induction scheme to ‘allow teachers to quickly reach the standard for full registration’.
Unions have hit out at the proposal – which would allow trainees to become teachers in just a year – comparing it to ‘on-the-job’ training schemes, which they claim had been discredited in England.
Last night Scottish Tory education spokesman Liz Smith said it was ‘right to explore new routes into teaching, provided these new routes do not cut corners or diminish professional standards’.
Drew Morrice, assistant secretary of the EIS teachers’ union, said the proposal would mean new teachers would missing out on vital experience in schools. Professor David Kirk, head of Scotland’s largest school of education at Strathclyde University, said such a route would lead to ‘untrained people effectively being teachers’.
Under the Teach First scheme south of the Border, teachers begin working in schools after a six-week intensive summer course and then
‘Do not cut corners’
on the job with the goal of completing the one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Education at the end of the first year.
But teachers who qualify through this route are more likely to leave the profession and view teaching as a ‘temporary proposition and an intermediary step’, Glasgow University researchers have found.
They cite analysis by the Department for Education in England, which found that Teach First teachers were five times more likely to quit than those who had undergone a ‘traditional postgraduate teacher education’.
Mr Morrice said the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), the profession’s regulator, had been ‘quite resolute’ in protecting the number of hours on the training scheme to ensure teachers meet the required standard.
He said he feared the introduction of a ‘Scottish variation of some of the fast-track schemes that have been discredited south of the Border’.
Last month Aberdeen City Council warned some of its schools could be forced to close because of a growing shortage of teachers.
The GTCS said that the organisation had been proactive in supporting new routes into teaching over the past year to help address the teacher shortage.
A spokesman said: ‘It is in the public interest that we continue to uphold teaching standards and ensure that only properly qualified, high-quality teachers are allowed to work in Scottish classrooms.’
A Scottish Government spokesman ruled out plans for a Teach First-style training model north of the Border and said it was ‘committed to developing a new route which is focused on getting highquality graduates into priority areas and subjects by 2017-18’.