SECONDARY schools in Southampton had one of the highest rates of teacher job vacancies in the country last year - new figures have revealed.

Statistics show more than two per cent of teaching roles in the city’s schools were “vacant” in November 2016.

According to the figures, complied by the BBC’s Local News partnership, Southampton had 10 “vacant” teacher jobs across its secondary schools at the time.

Of those, nine were filled by teachers on temporary contracts - ranging from a term, up to a year.

As a result, around 2.1 per cent of teaching jobs in the city’s secondary schools weren’t filled by permanent teaching staff at the time the data was collected.

This puts Southampton in line with local authority areas such as Luton, Slough and Milton Keynes, as one of the worst performing in the country.

Nationally around, 0.25 per cent of teaching posts in secondary schools were vacant, while 0.84 per cent were filled with temporary teachers in November 2016.

This equates to 412 vacant teaching posts, while 1,227 other jobs were filled on a temporary basis.

Despite coming near the bottom of the class for secondary school teacher vacancies, Southampton performed much better in terms of primary schools.

Just 0.2 per cent of teaching roles in the city’s primaries were vacant or filled by teachers on temporary contracts.

This is significantly below the national average, of 1.2 per cent.

Southampton particularly excelled in terms of reducing the number of vacant roles in its schools between 2014 and 2016.

The statistics show the city had 13 full-time vacant teaching posts in 2014, across its primary and secondary schools.

By November last year, that been reduced to just three - a 77 per cent decrease.

Meanwhile, schools in the Hampshire County Council run-area performed well across the board.

The county-authority had below national average vacancy rate at primary school level.

But it particularly excelled at secondary school level, with just a 0.2 per cent vacancy rate in November 2016.

Nationally, the statistics show there were 920 vacancies for full-time teachers in state-funded schools in England last year, a rate of 0.3 per cent.

A further 3,280 full time posts, 0.9 per cent, were being filled on a temporary contract.

The national picture has sparked fears of a recruitment crisis among industry heads.

Chris Keates, from the teachers’ union, NASUWT, has blamed “excessive workload” and “year-on-year cuts to teachers’ pay”.

However a spokesperson for the Department of Education said the government had invested £1.3billion in teacher recruitment, adding that there are 15,500 more teachers than there were in 2010.