Scrapping teacher training colleges and letting schools train their own staff would be the best way to tackle the teacher shortage, says the head teacher who received a knighthood last week.

Sir Kevin Satchwell, head teacher of Thomas Telford School, says that allowing schools to recruit their own trainees is the answer to the longstanding difficulties in recruiting teachers.

Speaking in a BBC News Online forum, Sir Kevin said that devolving training to schools would be the single most effective means of improving recruitment.

Sir Kevin, head teacher of the first non-selective state school to achieve 100% of pupils achieving five good GCSEs, said that "schools are well positioned to be able to train their own teachers".

"Every school could be allowed to train its own students on a reasonable salary - cutting out the bureaucracy of being taught in a traditional PGCE course," said Sir Kevin.

This salary, which he proposed would be at the level of �12,000 to �14,000, would allow schools to recruit students who would be trained to fill the school's most pressing needs.

"Everyone has a view about why teachers are not being recruited," he said - but the answer was "to give the responsibility to the heads and the funding to the schools".

Local difficulties

Recruitment shortages were often specific to a local area and he argued that individual schools were best placed to respond.

Sir Kevin envisaged a scheme in which a school such as his own would take on a dozen students, with schools recruiting trainees in anticipation of future staffing needs.

His own school had faced difficulties in finding a maths teacher, he said.

In terms of ensuring the quality of training, he said that it would be possible for universities to validate the standard of in-school training.

And he said that he was "relaxed" about the prospect of this meaning the disappearance of traditional teacher training colleges.

Speaking on the day that the Queen's Speech signalled a "radical overhaul" of the secondary school system, he also said that he would not be unhappy to see the term "comprehensive" disappearing.

The government has promised to recruit another 10,000 teachers - but there have been claims that this will not be enough to fill classroom vacancies.

This year a handful of schools have been forced to adopt a four-day week because of staff shortages.

And there have been widespread claims from teachers' unions that there was a serious nationwide problem with teacher recruitment.