Back to class for 400 maths teachers

Around 400 teachers of maths will go back to college in September to get properly qualified to take classes in the subject, a year after the courses were first announced.

They are an estimated 1,900, or one-in-three, who teach maths in second-level schools but did not have it as a major subject in their initial college degrees.

Most of them had taken maths for at least a year in college, but a major survey by the Teaching Council last autumn also suggests that around 150 people who teach maths never studied it at college. An earlier study by a University of Limerick (UL) research group showed that those with no maths qualification are rarely allocated senior classes.