Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw says ‘isolated, coastal and disadvantaged areas’ have serious problem while Labour accuses government of hiding evidence of recruitment problems

Ministers are at loggerheads with the England’s schools inspectorate in an escalating row over teacher shortages, amid new claims that the government is massaging figures on the number of people entering the profession.

Ofsted said on Saturday that its chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, regarded teacher shortages as a serious problem, especially in “isolated, coastal and disadvantaged areas”. The Department for Education, however, denied any serious problem and insisted that “the number and quality of teachers in our classrooms is at an all-time high”.

As state schools return from their Christmas holidays this week, the clear disagreement is likely to hang over the government, with a report on the subject by the House of Commons education select committee expected in the next few weeks.

Labour seized on the diverging lines being taken by ministers and the official schools inspectorate on Saturday night, accusing the government of publicly denying the crisis while at the same time trying to hide evidence of recruitment problems.

Lucy Powell, the shadow education secretary, said ministers were “the last ones left in denial about this crisis,” and accused the government of being guilty of “desperate” attempts to cover up shortages by changing how trainee targets and numbers are recorded.

She said the government had artificially lowered its target number for teacher trainees by removing undergraduates from official figures and inflated the number of postgraduate trainees recruited, by including participants on Teach First, a fast-track training scheme for graduates, making comparisons with previous years more difficult to draw.

Last week the Observer highlighted evidence submitted to the select committee inquiry in November by TeachVac, an independent vacancy-matching and monitoring service for education professionals, which suggested severe difficulties in recruiting teachers for several key secondary school subjects. The figures showed an 85% shortfall in the number of trainee teachers required to fill vacancies in social sciences and business studies, while the number of new teachers for design and technology was more than a third lower than needed.

The Department for Education last night denied there was a problem. “As part of our commitment to delivering educational excellence everywhere we are pleased that the number and quality of teachers in our classrooms is at an all-time high,” a spokesman said.

“With the economy improving we have redoubled our efforts to attract top graduates to the profession and we have over 1,000 more graduates training in secondary subjects – and record levels of trainees holding a first class degree. The vast majority of teachers stay in their roles for more than five years and more than half of those who qualified in 1996 were still in the profession 18 years later. The latest figures also show the number of former teachers coming back to the classroom has continued to rise year after year. As a result there are now 13,100 more full-time equivalent teachers than in 2010.”

However, an Ofsted spokesman said there was “stiff competition for high quality teachers, with schools especially in isolated, coastal and disadvantaged areas struggling to recruit”.

The spokesman said Wilshaw was also calling for the government’s initiative to deploy good and outstanding teachers to disadvantaged areas and the “National Teaching Service” to be expanded.

In a sign of his growing unease, Wilshaw argued in Ofsted’s annual report, published in December, that there was a danger of a “two-tier system” developing with “one group of schools more able to recruit and another less able to do so”.

He added that “with fewer trainees coming through, trainees could take their pick of the schools they wanted to work at when they qualified. Unsurprisingly, the majority opted for a well-performing school in a sought-after area with good transport links.”

If the problem was not addressed, he said, shortages would “further intensify the disparity in local and regional performance, and entrench the divide in quality across the country”.

Powell said that whereas in previous years the government’s targets had included separate postgraduate and undergraduate figures, this year the government only published a target for postgraduate trainees.

She also noted that in two parliamentary written answers the minister for schools, Nick Gibb, had recently refused to publish the combined target for 2015/16, or to explain why the change has been made. The Department for Education said there had been no change in methodology in 2015, and argued that it had increased transparency by publishing the model in full for the first time.