I took my last class on mid-year after finally securing a permanent post. They had had 6 teachers before me across the previous 2 years. Apart from one maternity leave, this had been down to insufficient staffing and contracts expiring, often because the school had submitted to have contracts extended but HR had taken so long to process it, the original teacher’s contract expired first.
Their education had suffered massively, they had minimal structure and routines and they were so disillusioned with school. We had a good 6 months together and made a lot of progress. At the end, they met their next teacher for the 26-27 session, someone who’d been assigned through citywide recruitment.
When they came back in August, they found out that person had been reassigned because they finally got a permanent post elsewhere on the last day of term in June. Another new person came in to take the class short-term while the school had to recruit for someone to take the year long post. Now their teacher has left, again, and once again the school is stuck with rotating supply teachers to staff the class while HR processes the recruitment.
I interviewed for my own role late last November, and started in January. The role had been vacant since August but the sheer volume of short-term teacher posts being processed for the new session pushed back recruitment. The whole process is so inefficient, it pushes good teachers out of school which would love to keep them, and children are paying the price. It’s awful.
This is answer 220 of the 269 written answers that teachers let us quote anonymously in the Scottish Teacher Employment Survey 2026. It answers the survey’s last question: what do the people who make decisions about teacher employment need to know?
We have corrected spelling, added paragraph breaks and removed details that could identify anyone. Words in square brackets are ours.