Cole-Hamilton attacks SNP mishandling of teacher recruitment

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has today accused the First Minister of lacking passion in his government’s handling of education as he criticised the failure to recruit teachers for key subjects like Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Computing Science.

Mr Cole-Hamilton said:

“After four years of asking, I’ve finally got the message – I am pretty sure I now know when the Cabinet will next meet. Thanks to Jamie Greene’s defection to the Liberal Democrats, I need never trouble the First Minister with that question again.

“There is a crisis in teacher training. Over the last three years the Scottish Government has aimed to train 750 maths teachers. In reality, it has missed that target by a country mile, training only a third of the maths teachers Scotland needs. So can I ask the First Minister, what’s going wrong?”

Responding to the First Minister, he went on to say:

“While that was a typically managerial answer, this is our kids we are talking about. Where is the hunger? Where is the passion?

“It’s not just maths. Chemistry, physics, biology - each of them hundreds of trainee teachers short.

“The government says there’s an economic urgency to address the digital skills shortage, yet it’s only training 16 computing teachers this year. Sixteen for the whole of Scotland.

“We’ll need homegrown skills if we’re going to lead in industries like renewables, AI, defence, precision medicine.

“In this volatile world, amid the economic firestorm of the Trump Presidency, Scotland’s people are our biggest asset. But how are we going to compete if our schools can’t teach these subjects properly, because they just don’t have the teachers?”