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One of the responsibilities of the DES is to plan for the recruitment and training of an appropriately qualified teaching force to meet the needs of our schools. Recent policy has paid considerable attention to the congruence between the training and qualifications of teachers and their teaching programmes; the term used to describe this relationship is ‘match’. Match can be investigated with respect to various aspects of a teacher's qualifications and training; the subject content, the age‐phase trained for, the professional aspect of the training. This paper concentrates on one aspect of match, that of the subject content of the initial qualification with the subsequent teaching programmes within the secondary sector. It is argued that during the next decade demographic and economic factors will pose considerable challenges to the recruitment and maintenance of an appropriately matched teaching force. Furthermore it is argued that many of the current Government policies may well exacerbate the problem by weakening local authority discretion in the deployment of teachers and also by rendering teaching a less secure and attractive career. This paper argues for a better understanding of how teachers are deployed within schools and authorities, it also argues for an urgent review of policies involving the teaching force and suggests some policy options open to Government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]