Hundreds of newly-qualified teachers have been unable to get full-time jobs in Scottish schools, latest figures show.

An official survey found that only 52% of 2588 teachers who finished their probationary year in 2006 secured a full-time permanent post, compared with 67% of the previous year's similar intake. Of the rest, 30% were on temporary contracts and 15% had supply work.

Critics believe the problem lies in a lack of planning by the Scottish Executive following the recruitment of thousands of additional teachers in the past three years to meet political commitments to cut class sizes.

Opposition parties last night said the executive's recruitment strategy for education was a shambles.

As part of a pledge to have a total of 53,000 teachers by this summer, the number of students at teacher training institutions in Scotland has risen from 2300 a year in 2003-04 to more than 4000 in 2006-07.

Ministers have also run an overseas recruitment campaign which has resulted in the arrival of record numbers of teachers from abroad. Figures released in December 2006 showed that 1284 foreign teachers arrived that year from as far afield as Australia, Ghana, Peru and Poland. However, most newly-qualified teachers and overseas staff want to live in urban areas such as Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Central Belt, rather than in rural parts of Scotland.

While councils such as East Renfrewshire and Glasgow have no difficulty filling vacancies, local authorities such as Dumfries and Galloway and Aberdeenshire often struggle.

Matthew MacIver, chief executive of the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), which conducted the survey, called for greater efforts to match new teachers to vacant posts. He said: "No-one should doubt the induction scheme is one of the great success stories of Scottish education, but there are still issues that need to be addressed regarding the allocation of probationers to available posts.

Mr MacIver called for ministers to establish a specialist development group to explore the professional development of new teachers beyond the induction year which would include how new teachers were matched with vacancies.

Fiona Hyslop, SNP education spokeswoman, said: "The executive seems incapable of strategic workforce planning across the whole of Scotland.

"Thousands more teachers are coming through training and hundreds more from overseas, but there has been no attempt to match them to where they are actually needed in classrooms."

The executive argued that, while there was pressure on the system because of the large numbers of new teachers, most would find jobs by the start of the new school year as local authorities employed additional staff to meet class size commitments. A spokeswoman said: "Councils don't have to meet these commitments until August 2007 and, if they do that, then the jobs will be there. We have not trained more teachers than we need."

Charles Gray, education spokesman for local authority group Cosla, said councils were planning for the number of new teachers needed in August. "We expect this imbalance to level out because when councils get the money to meet the class size commitments they will be employing more teachers," he said.

The executive has a target of having 53,000 teachers in place in August 2007. The latest teacher census showed that there are 52,179 teachers in Scotland.

The extra staff will be used to reduce class sizes to a maximum of 25 in P1 and an average of 20 in S1 and S2 for maths and English.