The state school service commission (SSC) announced on Tuesday that 658 candidates will be called for around 1,000 vacant posts during the initial counselling to recruit teachers for government-aided upper primary schools (Classes VI to VIII).

The candidates will be called nine years after they wrote the State Level Selection Test (SLST) in 2015.

The council on Tuesday also uploaded on its website the final vacancy list at the upper primary level which stands at 14,339. It has uploaded the link to download an intimation letter to attend the counselling.

Counselling for subjects like pure science, geography, history and Nepali will be conducted on October 3 and 4. For subjects like Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, English, Bengali and bio-science, it will be held from October 24 to 29 after the Puja vacation.

“We have uploaded the intimation letter for 658 candidates,” said Siddhartha Majumdar, the chairperson of the commission.

As many as 13,298 candidates will be called for a little over 13,000 vacant posts in the subsequent round of counselling, the dates of which will be announced after October 29.

The commission proceeded with the counselling after a Calcutta High Court division bench asked it on August 28 to recruit 14,052 assistant teachers within eight weeks, rejecting a petition by some of the unsuccessful candidates who, the court contended, had no right to stall the recruitments because the results were “not palpable to them”.

A commission official said they fixed the counselling schedule after a division bench of the Supreme Court last week decided against staying the high court order. Although the court told them to recruit teachers within eight weeks from August 28, the official said they will need more time because of the Puja vacation in between.

These will be the first school recruitments in many years.

In May 2022, the commission issued a notice stating that it would soon give an advertisement to hold a written test to appoint headmasters/mistresses and assistant teachers. In 2023 it prepared draft rules which said a hard copy of the merit-based panel containing the names and roll numbers of the candidates, including the waitlisted ones, and the marks scored by them will be preserved in its office for 10 years or till disposal of the court case, if any, filed against the selection process at the court of law.

But an official said they could not give the advertisement as the school education has yet to approve.