A shortage of qualified teachers in British schools has caused school heads to push under-qualified to fill in the gaps -- sometimes temporarily, sometimes on a longer-term basis -- even for demanding subjects like maths.

There is a shortage of approximately 5,500 maths teachers, which indicates both a short-term problem and a difficult future. Some of these schools are so desperate for a maths teacher that school heads are going to the extent of asking physical education teachers to step in and teach mathematics to younger and remedial students.

Other schools have gone to the extent of requesting teaching assistants to take the reins. Many of the newly qualified teachers coming straight from university are avoiding mathematics because of increasing pressure from the schools, the parents and even from the government.

Looking at it keenly, you will realize that in most schools the shortage of math teachers, the students are very far behind in the curriculum.

Any teacher that has enough gut to take it from there will have to pick from very far and the pressure to take the students to the place where they should be according to the curriculum is enormous.

Seeing as teaching assistants and PE teachers have been taking the students through math for the past couple of week or even months, I doubt any of the students have grasped much since these teachers might be qualified in their various fields but they are certainly not qualified in the field of mathematics. Any teacher therefore, newly qualified or not, will have a big problem with the students’ understanding of mathematics and their ability to grasp new concept.

Needless to say it will be necessary that these teachers make room for extra classes in order to make the students get back on track since they will have been lagging behind.

The extra pressure that will consequently lead to teachers teaching extra classes will not only cause exhaust to the teachers but also increase their workload.

This is one of the reasons why these teachers are shying away from teaching mathematics.

Part of the problem is also that if these students keep experiencing such issues with math subjects they will grow to hate math as a subject and perform poorly in it which will lead to those students hating the subjects.

If students start hating math at such a young age they will never consider teaching math subject when they grow p and decide to join the teaching profession and the cycle of no math teachers will continue.

It is very unfortunate that our students are being taught math by PE teachers who are not only under qualified in the subject but are clearly not motivated one bit to have the students learn the subject.

These teachers probably do not have any idea of what teaching techniques are used to teach the subject and this does not help the students in any way.

We need to have qualified teachers teach mathematics so we can save our students from the under qualified teachers.