On Saturday I received a text from a friend alerting me to the fact that a number of new History teaching jobs had just been made available through the Department for Education’s, ‘Investing in the Teaching Workforce Scheme’. This is an innovative new scheme that encourages teachers over the age of 55 to retire – and guarantees their jobs to recent teaching graduates.

This sort of scheme is very necessary in an environment where only 2% of Northern Ireland’s newly qualified teachers will find a full-time, permanent job at the end of their PGCE – a number that rises to 19% if one includes part-time or temporary work. Indeed, on the last day of my PGCE we were asked if anyone had found any work whatsoever – and only two out of 130 had. In both cases, they were planning on leaving Northern Ireland.

Low employment rates are a by-product of a system that over-produces teachers every single year. A 2013 report by the Department for the Economy showed that there were around 1,500 registered teachers who graduated between 2008 and 2013 who were not employed within the teaching profession – representing almost 60% of those who had trained during that period. That report also indicated that up to 50% of a single year group could still be without employment in the teaching profession five years after their graduation.

A natural solution to this would be to cut the number of new teachers graduating each year. Short of that, the ‘Investing in the Teaching Workforce Scheme’ seems like a positive step in helping new graduates find employment.

Yet the scheme, first announced by John O’Dowd in 2015, has already been delayed due to a failed legal challenge – one where a more experienced teacher claimed he was being discriminated against in not being able to apply for the new jobs made available by the scheme. In that instance, the court found that “there exists a real need to promote access to employment for younger graduates in the teaching profession” and that the scheme was a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”

With that in mind, one might have thought the Department would be more careful in the design of the scheme when it was finally revealed earlier this year. And yet, bizarrely, the Department have today confirmed that 2018 graduates will not be included within the scheme as they “had not experienced difficulty in obtaining meaningful employment.”

This response defies belief. In an environment in which 50% of graduates who graduated up to five years ago are struggling to find employment, it is a nonsense to suggest that this year’s graduates are not experiencing difficulties. The Department have created a ladder but removed the very first rung.

Moving forward, this retrograde step needs to be challenged. We may no longer have an Assembly but the Department for Education must be held to account. There are hundreds of newly-qualified teachers out there just itching to get into the classroom. It’s time to let them teach.