Part-time training courses plan to solve shortage of primary teachers

A NEW initiative has been launched to ease a classroom crisis – parttime online courses for would-be teachers.

A cash-strapped council has teamed up with a leading university in a bid to tackle staff shortages which have badly affected schools in recent years.

Would-be educators will be able to study parttime to gain the necessary qualifications to set them up for a career in the classroom thanks to the initiative between Moray Council and Aberdeen University.

Moray has 37 teaching vacancies listed.

The council’s director of education and social work, Laurence Findlay, yesterday described the forthcoming initiative as the organisation’s attempt to “grow its own” teachers to meet demand.

Mr Findlay said: “This has to be the way forward to encourage more people to take up teaching.”

People can begin studying for their postgraduate diploma in education online from the beginning of next year.

Applications for the course are open now.

The course is structured in such a way that aspiring primary school teachers will be able to study in their own time.

The course comprises an 18-month programme of study, which will include 18 weeks of placement experience in a Moray primary school with a guaranteed probationer year too. SCOTRAIL achieved its best performance in more than two years last week as around 95 per cent of trains arrived within five minutes of their schedule.

A total of 95.4 per cent of services hit the industry performance target between Sunday June 25 and Saturday July 1.

That is the the highest since the Dutch parent firm Abellio took on the 10-year franchise for the country’s trains in April