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Scottish higher education is facing severe staff recruitment problems in the wake of a new pay deal for teachers, the Association of University Teachers Scotland has warned.

The union, which holds its annual council meeting in Edinburgh tomorrow, is preparing for a ministerial review of higher education this summer.

It is set to highlight the Scottish teachers' pay settlement in the wake of the McCrone review, estimated as a rise of at least 23 per cent over three years.

A discussion paper says: "The McCrone report found that further and higher education lecturers were one of the few professional groups to do worse than schoolteachers and they also found that the hours worked by university teachers were well in excess of those worked by schoolteachers."