The Department for Education's teacher supply model sets the target number of trainee teachers required for each subject.
Filling out the lists of "summer reading" their teachers required as the school year began, my children and I ran across a quandary of our own.
Only the occasional involuntary straightening of a "d" shows that the penman is forcing himself to write with his right hand, because that is what Midwestern teachers required of southpaw schoolboys in the mid-nineteen-twenties.
The number of new teachers for design and technology is also more than a third below what it needs to be and there is a 10% shortfall in the number of IT teachers required.
The figures showed an 85% shortfall in the number of trainee teachers required to fill vacancies in social sciences and business studies, while the number of new teachers for design and technology was more than a third lower than needed.
Funding for schools, however, has been squeezed in real terms since the coalition came to power and critics claim headteachers have been put under pressure to reduce "non-essential" spending, including on supply teachers required to cover lessons for colleagues engaged on visits.
A study last year by the Rand Corporation, an American think-tank, found that the tests given to teachers required "only low level cognitive responses", while the criteria for evaluation were fuzzy and subject to manipulation.The new agreement between Mr Calderón and Ms Gordillo has two aims.
In fact, recent estimates suggest that teacher-training programs will crank out fewer than half of the 19,000 teachers required by 2006.
