That is the challenge every year. In the past few academic years, the Scottish Government has increased the number of teacher training places at Aberdeen in the hope that a greater influx of local people will result in more people being happy to stay there. Additional probationers will come through from that system.
I do not want to repeat myself, but the key issue is that we need to know where the people who we have spent a lot of money training actually end up. We need to know what the fallout is from the fact that people’s lifestyles have changed. When I trained, people were desperate to get started in a job but, nowadays, a lot of young people get a qualification and then head off, and they might not come back to teaching in Scotland for a decade. That does not seem to be factored into the current arrangements, so we need to look at that.
We need to think through how we are spending money. The Scottish Government has announced £100 million of attainment challenge funding, at £25 million a year. That is excellent and we welcome that money, but I do not know where it came from. When we were at the committee last year talking about budgets, there did not seem to be any money but, somewhere in the course of the year, additional money was found to address the issue.
The money has been allocated across seven local authorities, most of which have come up with schemes that involve employing additional teachers, as that will have the most impact on the young people who we are seeking to support. However, most of those authorities are now having to revise their thinking on that spending, because the system has not created the additional teachers that are necessary for those additional roles. Another issue is that directors up in the north-east are complaining that some of the teachers who they expected to migrate up to the north-east from the central belt—I am making it sound as if it is really far away—are not doing that, because they are getting jobs in the central belt through the attainment challenge funding.
That additional money is very welcome, but it has thrown a bit of a spanner into the works of teacher planning, because more posts have suddenly become available. For example, Glasgow was seeking to create 90 additional posts through the attainment challenge. That is a lot of teachers to suck out of the system when we already have a very fine balance. The issue is about the degree of planning that we put in. We know that the attainment challenge funding will be there for the next three years at least, so that should result in a corresponding increase in the number of students who are being taken into our colleges. If they are on the one-year postgraduate course, that feeds into the system quite quickly. With the primary and other BEd courses, if we increase numbers now, it takes three or four years before they come into the system.
I am suggesting that there is no easy answer, because nobody wants to have unemployed teachers who are unable to find work. We certainly need to look at expanding student recruitment into the profession, because we are moving towards fewer teachers being available for employment. Given the policy commitments that have been made around the attainment gap, there will be increasing demand for teachers.
A lot of teachers have also retired because the pension changes gave them the opportunity to go. Some of that loss was not anticipated. The pension changes impacted on people’s thinking, so that people who might have worked on past 60 have decided to call it a day. In fact, the Scottish Public Pensions Agency had to employ additional staff during the summer so that it could cope with the level of applications for premature retirement. That was another unexpected challenge to workforce planning arrangements.