Several countries successfully use centralized matching schemes for assigning students to study places or fresh graduates to their first positions. In this paper we explore the computational aspects of a possible similar scheme for assigning trainee teachers to schools. Our model is motivated by the situation characteristic for Slovak and Czech education system where each pre-service teacher specializes in two subjects. We show that if the two subjects can be performed independently in two different schools, then a feasible assignment can be found efficiently by employing network flow techniques. By contrast, the requirement to perform both subjects at the same school leads to intractable problems even under several strict restrictions concerning the total number of subjects, partial capacities of schools and the number of acceptable schools each teacher is allowed to list. Finally, we report on an integer programming model for solving the 'inseparable subjects' case of the teachers assignment problem and the results of its application to real data.
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