The crisis in Scottish teacher recruitment escalated yesterday after a survey revealed fewer than one in four of the probationers trained last year has found a permanent job.

New figures show only 770 of the 3426 probationers employed by local authorities last year are in full-time employment.

And even when new teachers employed on temporary or supply contracts are included, the figures show that only 45% of last year's probationers are in work.

The figures, compiled by the Times Educational Supplement Scotland, represent a significant drop from a similar survey carried out last year which showed that 32% of probationers had found permanent jobs at the start of term.

Critics believe the problem lies in a lack of planning by the Scottish Government following the recruitment of thousands of additional teachers in recent years to meet political commitments to cut class sizes.

There are concerns that, although the government is funding teacher training, it is not giving sufficient additional money to local authorities to employ the extra teachers.

There is also a geographical issue because most newly-qualified teachers are trained in urban areas and want to live and work in cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh or in the central belt rather than rural parts of Scotland.

While councils such as East Renfrewshire and Glasgow are regularly swamped with applications for vacancies, local authorities such as Dumfries and Galloway or Aberdeenshire often struggle to fill posts.

Another reason for the lack of employment could be that local authorities who take on trainee teachers for a year as part of their probation use them as a cut-price member of staff and simply replace them with another probationer rather than giving them full-time employment.

In addition, a high proportion of teachers are expected to reach retirement age over the next few years but the exodus has not yet started.

Ronnie Smith, general-secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland, said the statistics were "a pretty sorry indictment of local authorities", but added that the Scottish Government also had to tackle the issue. "This is not something it can regard as being at arm's length and say it is not our problem," he said.

John Stodter, general- secretary of the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, said the most remarkable fact about probationer employment was the divergence across the country. "We are getting stories of hundreds of individuals applying for one job in some parts of Scotland, while other authorities can't fill vacancies."

The key factors for new teachers looking for jobs, he said, appeared to be: How far are you from central Scotland, and how geographically dispersed is the authority?

"If folk were more willing to move, as they were in our day, they might have less of a problem," he added.

However, Fiona Hyslop, the Education Secretary, said surveys carried out last year by the General Teaching Council for Scotland showed that, by June, 92% of newly-qualified teachers were employed. She predicted that around 6000 teachers would retire or leave the profession this year - almost 400 more than last year - with similar figures expected in the years ahead.