Teachers should be able to qualify without having GCSE maths to help solve the recruitment crisis, the chairman of the Independent Schools Council has said.
Barnaby Lenon, dean of the faculty of education at the University of Buckingham, said talented people were rejected from teaching if unable to pass maths at GCSE.
A real-world numeracy test that has to be sat before starting teacher training courses should suffice, he said.
Secondary school recruitment is in crisis, with only 50 per cent of the required number of trainee teachers taken on this September, down from 57 per cent the year before. In physics, only 17 per cent of the target was met and only in history, PE and classics was it exceeded.
