New Scottish Teachers Fill Classrooms Without Permanent Jobs

23% of Scotland’s 2024/25 Teacher Induction Scheme teachers held a full-time permanent post by September 2025. That is down from 25% for the previous cohort and from 57% for the 2016/17 intake.

The share in any teaching post in a publicly funded school rose to 69%, from 65% a year earlier. Temporary full-time and part-time posts together took 44% of the cohort, so the employment rebound is mostly insecure work.

Only 23% Landed a Full-Time Permanent Post

The Scottish Government’s pupil and teacher characteristics release, last updated on 24 March 2026, tracks Teacher Induction Scheme (TIS) leavers in the next school staff census. For the 2024/25 cohort that snapshot is September 2025, and it records 23% in a full-time permanent post.

Another 1% were in part-time permanent posts. Full-time temporary posts took 34%, part-time temporary posts 10%. The remaining 31% sit in the census “other” group, which is not a count of unemployment. It includes supply work, independent schools, posts abroad or in further education, non-teaching jobs, and people who have left.

First-year employment in a counted school post, 69%, is still the second-lowest rate since the 2010/11 cohort and well below the 88% peak for 2016/17. Cohorts from 2007/08 to 2009/10 came in under 60%. The 2024/25 headcount was 2,294, the smallest in the published 2018/19 to 2024/25 run, down from 3,218 in 2021/22.

TIS COHORT EMPLOYMENT BY TYPE

Across the whole school workforce, 82% of teachers were in permanent posts in 2025, 14% in temporary posts and 4% on the TIS. The profession is still mostly permanent at the stock level. The entry pipeline is not.

North Lanarkshire Hired No Permanent Primary Teachers

The national percentages flatten a local pattern that is harsher. North Lanarkshire’s September 2025 FOI return, covering the council that includes Cumbernauld, shows how the TIS year ended on the ground.

NORTH LANARKSHIRE, SEPTEMBER 2025

• Places allocated: 144 (78 primary, 66 secondary), of whom 132 completed and 12 opted out or did not finish.
• Primary completers: 0 permanent contracts, 25 fixed-term, 47 on supply lists only.
• Secondary completers: 8 permanent, 15 fixed-term, 34 on supply lists only.
• Council caveat: some people may have found teaching work outside North Lanarkshire, and names can sit on more than one supply list.

None of the 72 primary completers were kept on permanently in the authority that trained them. Eight of 60 secondary completers were. The council’s overall teacher count still rose, from 3,682 FTE in 2024 to 3,719 in 2025, a gain of 37, while that primary TIS cohort was parked on fixed-term deals and supply.

Scottish Teachers for Permanence, a campaign group that has FOI’d councils, put Glasgow’s 2024 permanent conversion at 3.8%, against 64.9% in 2017. The same group described a probationer invited to what looked like a job interview, then told there was no post, with an offer to teach unpaid “for experience”. That is the labour market the census is photographing.

The Induction Year Still Guarantees Only 12 Months

TIS is a Scottish Government scheme, in place since 2002, that gives eligible graduates a salaried year in a local authority school. GTC Scotland administers parts of it. Class contact is capped at 0.82 FTE, 0.8 FTE on average across the session, so there is time for mentoring and for a headteacher to judge whether someone meets the Standard for Full Registration.

It is a training year with a job attached, not a promise of a second contract. Participants pick five authorities in preference order and accept a placement in any of them. After June, they compete for whatever the next census will later count as permanent, temporary, or other.

GTC Scotland published five recommendations for a new induction model on 19 March 2026, after ministers announced a TIS review in May 2025. On 11 March 2026, 4,372 of 80,510 teachers on the register held only provisional registration; 2,258 were on TIS and 2,114 on the Flexible Route. Chief executive Dr Pauline Stephen said the report should be “a starting point for national work to accelerate on shaping a new approach to teacher induction”. The five asks are professional language, a unified long-term framework, better mentoring, a return to induction’s proper purpose, and funding lined up with those outcomes. At the time of that report, she and the council still described the review’s scope as unclear.

Andrea Bradley, general secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland, has been blunter about what the year after induction now looks like.

Ironically, thousands of qualified teachers who could be permanently employed to share the massive workload burden, are limping from one temporary contract to another, being pushed from pillar to post in order to find enough work to earn a living.

Andrea Bradley, EIS general secretary, on the union’s workload ballot

Teacher Numbers Sit 810 Below the 2021 Workforce

The SNP’s 2021 manifesto pledged to increase teacher numbers and classroom assistants by a further 3,500 on top of the previous parliament’s rise. The 2025 census puts Scotland at 53,475 teachers, including early learning. That is 63 up on 2024, when the total was 53,412, and 46 up if the count is limited to school teachers. It is still 810 below the 54,285 recorded in 2021. Add the missing 3,500 to that 810 and the EIS’s arithmetic is 4,310 short of the promised level.

FROM THE 2021 PLEDGE TO THE 2025 CENSUS

1. 2021: Manifesto pledge of 3,500 extra teachers and classroom assistants; census total 54,285.
2. 2023: Teacher numbers at 54,033, the last peak before three years of decline.
3. 2024: Total 53,412, the low point of that run.
4. May 2025: Scottish Government announces a review of the Teacher Induction Scheme.
5. September 2025: Staff census finds 23% of the 2024/25 TIS cohort in full-time permanent posts.
6. 9 December 2025: Pupil and teacher characteristics published; 24 March 2026 update confirms the tables.

The overall pupil-teacher ratio eased to 13.2 from 13.3. Sixteen local authorities increased teacher numbers or held them; sixteen cut. Bradley, opening the EIS’s statutory ballot over workload, said newly qualified staff were limping from one temporary contract to another while class contact and the extra-teacher pledge stayed unmet. The EIS has also argued that casual contracts are bad for pupils, because staffing churn is an operational mess for schools.

Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth has urged new teachers to be “open to” relocating and has said it is “not usual for folk to be sitting on supply for many years”. Mike Corbett, NASUWT’s national official in Scotland, called that a dodge: thousands of teachers, he said, are being trained at public expense for jobs that do not exist, while permanent staff drown in workload.

Temporary Contracts Piled Up in Primary Schools

The national 23% is a blend of two markets. Census sector splits put full-time permanent placement at 11% for new primary teachers and 42% for new secondary teachers. Primary is where the TIS year most often fails to become a job. Secondary still converts at a higher rate, and even there geography, history, modern studies and music sit well below the old permanence levels, with physics only a little above 50% in the same write-ups of the tables.

Workforce-planning papers for the 2025 exercise already treated primary as oversupplied. Officials noted that around 950 primary teachers completed probation between 2019/20 and 2022/23 and could not find a following post because of job availability. The model in that round cut the assumed TIS reduction rate to 10%, on the grounds that copying the previous five-year average would keep adding to the glut.

That split is the trap. Councils can still be short in secondary subjects while they rotate surplus primary probationers through supply. Training allocations do not match advertised vacancies subject by subject, so people from oversubscribed fields are used as cover for absence in shortage subjects once the guaranteed year ends. Holyrood sets intake and funding; councils sign the contracts. Each side can point at the other while the census records another year of temporary posts.

Later Censuses Leave Most New Teachers Off Permanent Contracts

Follow-up snapshots do not repair the first-year hole. They track whether someone is in any counted teaching post, not whether the contract has become permanent. For cohorts from 2021/22 onward, that any-post rate tends to rise a little after year one. For earlier cohorts it tends to fall.

SHARE STILL IN A TEACHING POST AT EACH CENSUS

The 2018/19 intake, which started with 84% in a post and 48% full-time permanent, was still at 78% in some teaching post by September 2025. The 2023/24 intake moved from 65% to 68%. The 2024/25 intake opens at 69%. Those later ticks are people finding some work, including more temporary posts. They are not a return to the 57% full-time permanent rate of 2016/17.

The 2024/25 cohort was already the smallest in this series, 924 people below the 2021/22 headcount. Shrinking the pipeline has not opened permanent rooms. It has left a thinner group of new teachers sharing the same temporary pattern, with supply work sitting outside the 69% and primary permanence in the low teens.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the Teacher Induction Scheme work in Scotland?

Eligible graduates from Scottish initial teacher education are offered a guaranteed salaried year in a local authority school, with class contact capped at 0.82 FTE so a supporter and reviewer can evidence the Standard for Full Registration. GTC Scotland runs the placement matching against five chosen authorities; the year is a condition of moving from provisional to full registration, not a second-year job offer.

What is the flexible route if someone skips TIS?

Probation can be completed on the Flexible Route instead of TIS, usually while picking up work without the guaranteed 0.8 FTE year. On 11 March 2026 that route held 2,114 provisionally registered teachers, almost as many as the 2,258 then on TIS, and GTC Scotland has warned of “negative perceptions” about Flexible Route teachers even though both paths lead to the same standard.

What does “other” mean in the post-probation census?

It is everyone from that TIS cohort not found in a permanent or temporary post in a publicly funded Scottish school at census date, a bucket that mixes supply lists, independent and further-education teaching, work abroad, non-teaching jobs, and unemployment. The census also records posts, not contracts, so a teacher with a permanent contract can still be listed as temporary in a specific post; anyone with at least one permanent post is counted as permanent.

When did the Teacher Induction Scheme start?

TIS has run since 2002, after the McCrone settlement on teachers’ pay and conditions, and GTC Scotland’s March 2026 paper treated it as more than 20 years old and due a redesign. Ministers announced a review in May 2025; by March 2026 the regulator said the review’s scope was still not settled.

How many teachers were on the GTCS register in March 2026?

GTC Scotland counted 80,510 teachers on the register on 11 March 2026, of whom 4,372 held only provisional registration. That provisional group is the pool still working toward full registration through TIS or the Flexible Route, and it is separate from the 2,294-strong 2024/25 TIS cohort measured in the September 2025 school census.

The 2024/25 TIS cohort was the smallest in the published series, and it still could not turn a guaranteed training year into a full-time permanent post for more than 23% of its teachers.