The government’s School Direct scheme is failing to deliver on its objectives, resulting in “severe” teacher shortages in schools, a new report has revealed.

Commissioned by TES, the study found that schools are struggling to fill vacancies for certain positions, despite their best efforts.

The initiative was introduced in 2012 as a way of giving schools more control over the training and recruitment of teachers.

Its selling point was a "sense confidence" that trainee teachers would receive all the relevant and necessary skills needed to be a teacher, while also providing supplementary benefits like an in-depth knowledge of the workings of a particular school.

However, according to TES’ research, which was led by professor John Howson, an expert on the labour market for teachers, the scheme has been unable to deliver consistent results across all subjects.

As such, this inability to meet recruitment targets – for subjects like biology, computing, RE, physics and design and technology – may lead to “a teacher supply crisis of a magnitude not seen since the early 2000s”.

The government has announced that it is to boost training bursaries to £25,000 to attract people to shortage subjects that are failing to attract talented individuals.

This includes School Direct, which would see schools offering salaried positions for trainees in maths, physics and computing benefit from a boost to funding.

“Teaching is not only a hugely rewarding career but it also offers fantastic opportunity for progression,” said schools minister David Laws.

“We want to attract the best and brightest graduates into the profession, to inspire even more young people to achieve their full potential. Increases to the range of bursaries and prestigious scholarship on offer for core subjects like maths, chemistry and physics will help us recruit the nation’s most talented graduates."