‘Teaching has become a precarious job’

In Angus, newly qualified primary teachers have “next to no hope of getting permanent jobs”, said Tory education spokesperson Liam Kerr last week. They are “stuck in a limbo of supply work, in which they are unable to buy a house”, he said, and “some report being unable to have a family”.

Addressing the Scottish Parliament last Thursday, he called for the government to “take practical action” and “rethink how it resources education departments”.

Meanwhile, the SNP MSP for Coatbridge and Chryston, Fulton MacGregor, reported more teachers coming to him because they cannot get permanent posts and have to rely on supply teaching.

He wanted to know what steps the government was taking to ensure that qualified teachers can find permanent posts in Scottish schools.

Job prospects ‘far worse’ in some local authorities

Labour education spokesperson Pam Duncan-Glancy summed up the situation: “That teaching has become a precarious job is not something that most of us in Scotland ever thought would be the case, and yet, in 2016, half of post-induction teachers got jobs and, in 2022-23, that had fallen to under a quarter.”

Jamie Orr’s painful personal experience reflects those statistics. He finished his probation in 2021, but has yet to secure a permanent post – or even an interview for one – and highlights that in some local authority areas, the job prospects are actually far worse than Duncan-Glancy’s figures suggest.

In Glasgow, only 10 per cent of primary teachers moved directly from probation to a permanent contract in 2023, down from 73 per cent in 2017. In South Lanarkshire, this figure dropped from 80 per cent in 2017 to 22 per cent last year.

Speaking to Tes Scotland earlier this month, Orr said he was “working as an admin assistant, which feels like such a waste of my training and experience”.

“I’d be thrilled with even a fixed-term contract at this point,” he said.

Orr helps to run Scottish Teachers for Permanence, a Facebook group with more than 3,500 members.

It is calling for immediate action to address the jobs crisis, including cutting the number of places on teacher education courses to address the “huge backlog” of teachers “who can’t get permanent jobs”; recognition that probationers are being used to fill posts because they are “a cheaper option”; and better understanding that lack of secure work does not just impact post-probationers but also teachers who have been seeking work for years.

‘Cycle of buck-passing’

Orr says the group also wants the “cycle of buck-passing” to end – where the government blames councils for the lack of jobs and councils blame the government.

This was in evidence in the Scottish Parliament last week. When responding to concerns raised by MSPs about the lack of secure work for teachers, the education secretary Jenny Gilruth said it was “worth saying” that councils had “responsibility for the employment of teachers”.

She was in discussion with the council umbrella body Cosla about the situation and awaiting advice from the Strategic Board for Teacher Education “on how we can better understand and tackle the challenge at local authority level”.

She added: “We are providing an extra £145.5 million, ringfenced, to protect teacher numbers.”

What Ms Gilruth failed to mention, however, is that, as yet, no Scottish council has signed up to the deal. Councils are arguing that they should not have to maintain teacher numbers – rather they want the funding to be based on maintaining the pupil-teacher ratio, which would free them up to cut teacher numbers as long as it was in line with falling rolls.

But if that were to happen, the next Scottish government pledge to go the way of free school meals and devices for all would be the promise to increase teacher numbers by 3,500 over the course of the current parliamentary term.

Failure to deliver already seems inevitable; teacher numbers have fallen for the past two years.

Real-life impact of jobs struggle

What the politicians and Orr make clear, however, is that there are real-life consequences for those who entered the profession in good faith.

Now there is a mismatch between the number of teachers in the system and jobs – and this year, primary and secondary teacher-education targets remain unchanged.

Another Scottish government promise – to reduce teachers’ class contact time – could be a light at the end of the tunnel.

As recently as last week, Gilruth reiterated the government’s commitment to that promise. She urged the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers to “get an agreement” so the government could “move at pace”.

However, while there might be “enough teachers in certain parts of the country right now to enable us to get going”, as Gilruth argued, more will be needed to deliver the pledge across primary and secondary.

In secondary, while there is an oversupply of teachers in some subject areas, such as history and PE, there are severe shortages in several subjects, including maths; computing; and craft, design and technology.

It is not clear where the missing staff will come from – or indeed how they will be paid for – and that provides little comfort for Orr and all the other teachers “stuck in limbo”.

Emma Seith is senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

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