Teachers from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa could be recruited to work in Sussex schools.

They may be encouraged to take posts here to help ease increasing teacher shortages in key subjects including maths, science and modern languages.

The plan is just one of a number of proposals being considered by a new task group set up by Brighton and Hove City Council to tackle the recruitment and retention of teachers.

A new joint initiative involving the council and a local housing association is also expected to be announced soon which will offer affordable housing to teachers as part of a key-workers scheme.

David Hawker, director of education, said: "We are in the initial discussion stage with one of the supply-teacher agencies about them acting on behalf of the local authority to recruit teachers abroad.

"We have a meeting with them this week and if things look good and the headteachers think it's worthwhile establishing an arrangement with them, then we will."

If it gets the go-ahead, teachers from overseas could be in Brighton and Hove classrooms by Christmas.

Mr Hawker said: "We know there are quite a number of very good people in Australia and New Zealand who want to take a few years out and teach in Britain, combining visiting Europe and working."

However, Mr Hawker is being cautious. He said: "We are only looking for good teachers and we have to be careful about this as we can't go wrong."

Most of the 11 secondary schools in Brighton and Hove have a vacancy for at least one specialist teacher and there are around 20 specialist maths teachers needed in the city. Mr Hawker said recruitment of teachers had been becoming more and more of a problem since the beginning of this academic year.

He blamed the difficulties on the cost of living in the area and national teacher shortages.

"We have increasingly recognised a problem. There are some schools which have had real problems recruiting in some subjects areas and some schools have had problems recruiting primary-school heads.

"We decided we need to do something fairly robust to tackle it."

The new task group, chaired by Mr Hawker, includes headteachers, education authority staff and representatives from Brighton and Sussex universities.

Its first full meeting is expected to take place within the next few weeks.

Members may decide to build on links between the council and universities.