Newly qualified teachers are graduating without sufficient skills to teach maths to primary children, MSPs have been told.

Holyrood’s education committee is investigating the future of the teaching profession in Scotland.

The committee took evidence on Wednesday from student teachers who cited issues with training.

Halla Price, a trainee teacher at Edinburgh University’s Moray House, told the panel of politicians she was taught “the fundamentals of reading and writing” in the first year of her course but little on numeracy.

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Ms Price said: “In terms of numeracy, we spent a lot of time going over ideas of activities we could do.

“However, there wasn’t enough focus on the teachers themselves having the skills to teach numeracy other than a maths audit we completed ourselves in second year, which did very little in all honesty to improve our own knowledge and mathematical understanding.

“I do not believe that everyone graduating from Moray House this year has the sufficient skills in numeracy to be able to teach it to 11-year-olds at a reasonable standard.”

William MacLeod, a post-graduate teaching student at the University of the Highlands and Islands, said: “I think literacy I would have less of an issue with, because literacy is being worked on throughout when we are doing essays, etc.

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“I would have more of an issue with numeracy because there is less chance for the university lecturers to see that we are numerate.”

“Going back to the basics on these would be helpful.”

Committee convener James Dornan said the committee has written to the General Teaching Council for Scotland for “urgent assurances” on issues raised by the trainee teachers.

The comments from the student teachers comes a day after a bi-annual survey showed less than half of S2 pupils could write well while almost a quarter of P4 pupils are not able to read to a sufficient standard.

Education secretary John Swinney said the survey’s results were “not good enough” and education reform was “now imperative”.