Statistics Publication Notice: Education and Training Series: Pre-School and Childcare Statistics 2010

Table 28: Number in posts, Headcount and Whole Time Equivalent ( WTE) of GTCS registered teachers employed or working peripatetically in local authority and partnership pre-school education centres, January 2004 to January 2010

Notes:

Centres were asked whether they provide pre-school education "following the Scottish 3-18 Curriculum for Excellence". Those that said yes were asked whether this was "as a local authority managed school or centre", "as a partner provider offering places funded by the local authority" or "neither".

In order to improve the consistency in reporting of GTCS registered teachers across pre-school centres, the pre-school teacher question and guidance notes were substantially developed in January 2008. This resulted in an unexpected significant impact on the number of GTCS registered teachers (which include multiple counting for shared/peripetetic teachers working in more than one centre). However, this did not appear to have a significant impact on the WTE measure. Therefore, caution should be made when comparing the number of GTCS registered teachers pre- and post- January 2008.

Teachers are counted once for each centre they work for, so the number of peripetetic/shared teachers contains some multiple-counting. However, since January 2009, centres were asked to provide additional information on individual teachers. This additional information has enabled an estimate of the true 'headcount' measure to be calculated on the actual number of physical teachers providing pre-school education across all centres. Each centre is also asked to calculate the teacher's WTE as the time they spend working in that centre, so the WTE should not be affected by the multiple-counting.

Teacher numbers are rounded to the nearest 10 and WTEs to the nearest whole number to express the uncertainty inherent in these estimates. For this reason, totals may not exactly equal the sum of their parts.