Attracting people from outside education to re-train as teachers and solve the teaching shortage has been a failure, according to the Volkskrant.

The campaign was launched in 2000 and was supposed to find over 4,000 new teachers a year. Some 1,121 registered for the new teachers training course in 2002, by 2006 the figure was just 224 and in the first six months of last year the number had fallen to 30, the paper says.