– in the Scottish Parliament at on 17 January 2018.
9. To ask the Scottish Government what it is doing to improve teacher recruitment. (S5O-01682)
The Government is taking a range of actions to help increase the number of teachers, including committing £88 million this year to make sure that every school has access to the right number of teachers with the right skills, investing over £1 million through the Scottish attainment challenge to support universities in developing new innovative routes into teaching, and launching the second phase of our teaching makes people recruitment campaign. That action has halted a period of steady decline in teacher recruitment, resulting in almost 800 more teachers than there were two years ago.
I have been contacted by some of my constituents regarding specialist teachers who are needed not only in science, technology, engineering and mathematics but in subjects such as music and art. What is the Scottish Government doing to attract high-quality individuals from other professions to increase teacher numbers in those areas?
In my earlier answer, I referred to the new routes into teaching. As part of that, we have worked closely with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on its new music teaching degree. As I said in one of my earlier answers, we have supported the University of Edinburgh with its new national return to teach course, which is open to teachers of all subjects, including art and music.
We are taking forward regular dialogue on this. Indeed, I had a discussion last week with the Scottish Council of Deans of Education about the appropriate recruitment and the balance of recruitment of teachers to ensure that we have the appropriate number of teachers with the right specialisms in our schools to deliver the curriculum for young people in Scotland.