The Education Minister is urging principals to get behind a new teacher-sharing scheme to ease the teacher recruitment crisis facing many schools.

The new scheme, due to begin next September, will allow secondary schools share teachers in priority subjects like STEM, modern languages, Irish and home economics.

The plan, brought forward by the Government Teacher Supply Steering Group, will allow to band together to recruit teachers – offering them more hours than one school could hope to on its own.

Minister McHugh said the scheme will optimise the use of teaching time and allow teachers to work as many hours as possible in high-demand subjects.

“Addressing the current and future challenges in teacher supply is a national priority,” he said.

“Principals and the boards of management in schools should seize this opportunity to work with a neighbouring school by sharing a teacher in a specialist subject.

“I urge schools to see this as an opportunity and begin the groundwork to make the most of this new scheme.”

He said the teacher recruitment and supply remains a “complex challenge” and insisted it can only be tackled if all stakeholders “continue to work together and seek to identify and implement flexible and innovative approaches to ensure that we meet the future needs of our schools, our teachers and our children.”

“It is a good option for the schools and for the teacher,” he said.

“I am confident that it will make a difference and help to ease the difficulties that some schools have experienced in sourcing teachers of high-priority subjects.

The scheme will kick in from the start of the 2019/20 school year and will be reviewed after its first full year.

It is one of a range of actions contained in the Government's Action Plan for Teacher Supply, published in November 2018.