This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

At the time of writing this article, voting has begun for the 2026 Holyrood election.

There are all sorts of possible outcomes before us, but no matter what happens, it’s a safe enough bet that teacher numbers will continue to be an issue over the next five years – and well beyond that too.

In December last year, Scotland’s national teaching regulator – the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) – warned that educators are leaving the profession “sooner than expected”, and called for a focus on teacher retention.

This is not a new concern: back in 2018, I was reporting on an ‘exodus’ of experienced teachers as statistics revealed a 21% drop in the number of educators aged 45 and over.

Teacher recruitment is clearly essential, but so is keeping teachers in the classroom. Both, it must be said, are becoming more difficult.

We need teaching to be seen as a viable and attractive option by school leavers and graduates, but we also need to be able to offer the right levels of support, challenge, and pay to get them to stay.

Some of the purported solutions to these interlinked problems, like the introduction of the fast-track Teach First model, would simply make matters worse in the medium and long term, but there are a number of serious, structural changes that might actually help.

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