Schools in Scotland cutting subjects due to teacher shortage 'crisis'

Secondary schools are reducing timetables and cutting whole subjects from the curriculum due to a lack of specialist teachers, education leaders have told BBC Scotland News.

The Association of Directors of Education in Scotland says a national action plan is needed urgently to increase recruitment and address the "crisis".

It says there are particular shortages in maths, science, design technology and computing, and that pupils are not accessing the full range of subjects in every year.

The Scottish government says Scotland has the lowest pupil/teacher ratio and some of the smallest class sizes of any country in the UK.

Analysis by BBC Scotland News has revealed that more than 4,000 spaces on the secondary postgraduate teacher training course, the PGDE, have not been filled in the past nine years.

Training recruitment targets have not been met in most subjects, with particular issues in maths, English and sciences.

Laurence Findlay, president of the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, said there was a "persistent and worsening shortage" of specialist teachers.

He said that as a result, some schools had not been able to offer home economics, computing and technical studies classes to certain year groups.

Findlay, who is director of education at Aberdeenshire Council, said head teachers were having to make difficult decisions because the situation had become a "crisis".

"I think it is a real crunch point and we need to see some decisive action on this very soon," he said.

He said it was time to look at the rules around how teachers could be recruited, as well as the attractiveness of teaching as a profession.

Louise Moir is head teacher of Mackie Academy in Stonehaven and vice-president of School Leaders Scotland.

She said schools were struggling to recruit teachers in both urban and rural areas.

Moir said head teachers were increasingly being forced to change timetables to fit the teachers they could recruit, rather than running the full range of subjects.

"Supply teachers are quite often going to classes in which they are not specialists, and they can't provide that knowledge and understanding that a subject specialist would," she said.

"We are fast approaching a point whereby educational provision, as it is recognised by the general public, is not going to be able to continue the way it is because we fundamentally will not have enough people in secondary schools on the ground to do that."

Moir said it took three to four years to fully staff the modern languages department at Mackie Academy.

Pupils currently have to learn