Universities have stepped in to ensure that all teaching jobs in the next academic year are filled, the former top civil servant at the Department for Education has said.

Ex-permanent secretary Sir David Bell has said the government's flagship schools-based training programme School Direct had under-recruited and universities needed to make up the surplus.

School Direct was tasked with filling a quarter of teaching training places but only produced two-thirds of that number, although the Department for Education has said these were never formal targets and added that teacher training allocations were always over and above the level required to staff classrooms.

Sir David told BBC News: "The cracks have been papered over thanks to universities stepping in at the last minute to take on unfilled places."

"We've got to ask some serious questions about schools' capacity to take on even more trainees next year, when they fell short this year".

The latest figures show that School Direct recruited 68 per cent of its allocation of 9,586. This accounted for 20 per cent of the whole pool of teacher trainees in England, while traditional university PGCEs filled all but 255 of the 26,785 training places they were allocated.

Going forward, the government is expected to increase the share of School Direct allocations to 37 per cent and Sir David warned that the scheme will need to deliver its targets as some universities were thinking of moving out of teacher training completely.

This would remove the safety net that helped fill the void this year and mean that Schools Direct, which has been criticised in the past for its stringent selection criteria, may need to be more accommodating to candidates.  

What are your views on the current state of teacher training in the UK? Is there a good candidate-to-teaching-job ratio?