What steps will be taken to address the current shortage of Gaelic-medium teachers following the recently announced #1 million extra invest…

The Executive is supporting the development of an initial teacher education course specifically for Gaelic-medium primary teaching and is funding an extra 10 student places at Strathclyde University in session 2001-02 to support primary Gaelic-medium provision.As a result of these measures, it is forecast that a total of 24 students able to teach in primary Gaelic-medium will qualify from teacher education institutions at the end of academic session 2001-02. This is double the number of students who qualified last year and will boost Gaelic medium teacher numbers considerably.In addition, the current campaign to recruit more teachers includes TV advertising to coincide with Gaelic programming, advertisements in the Gaelic press and key pages of the supporting website will soon appear in the Gaelic language.