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Aberdeenshire Council wans to pump cash into teacher recruitment

Aberdeenshire Council wants to spend £150,000 to recruit new teachers
Aberdeenshire Council wants to spend £150,000 to recruit new teachers

Aberdeenshire Council will today ask councillors to approve pumping more than £100,000 into a teacher recruitment drive.

In July this year, the local authority revealed that it had 100 posts left to fill to meet a Scottish Government target of 2,700 teachers. Failing to meet the requirement could result in financial penalties.

Maria Walker, the director of education at the council, now wants to allocate £150,000 over the financial year to recruitment agencies to bring in new staff, but needs the approval of the authority’s policy and resources committee.

In a report to go before the committee today, she says the authority “is close to meeting its teacher number targets”.

The council currently sets aside £127million each year for funding teachers.

“Difficulties experienced in recruiting teachers has resulted in teacher some staffing budget being under spent in recent years,” she added.

“The cost of using agencies will depend both on demand and the availability of teachers via agencies.

“Using agencies is effective in complementing advertising in print and social media and has been effective in attracting new teachers to Aberdeenshire.”

Last month, the Press and Journal revealed that local authorities in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Moray, Highland, Orkney and Shetland had spent about £1million on job adverts in recent months because of the ongoing teacher shortages.

Leaders of the councils have since called for talks with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon who they have invited to a meeting at Aberdeen’s Beach Ballroom on October 7.

A Scottish Government spokesman said it would confirm who would attend the summit nearer the time.

He added: “We are committed to ensuring schools have the right number of teachers with the right skills. That is why we acted to safeguard teacher posts for the next year by committing a £51million package of funding for Scotland’s local authorities to maintain teacher numbers and pupil teacher ratios at 2014 levels in 2015-16.

“In each of the last four years the Scottish Government has also increased student teacher numbers.”

In Aberdeenshire, the government wants 13.5 pupils to each teacher.