Good for you for trying to avoid the recruiters Josh.

What kind of position are you trying to find? I guess you're looking for a public school or university position as the training schools are usually easy to contact directly.

Once you've identified a position then you can always trying searching for the school or university's official website. You might find a couple of contacts there and if you send out enough emails you may get lucky. As the OP stated the recruitment agencies aren't doing anything that a teacher (or for that matter a school) can't do for themselves.

If you do find a position that you really like the look of but have to use a recruiter then just remember the other piece of advice by the OP - Recruiters are in it for themselves! It may sound a bit cut throat but you probably need to take on the same attitude. I've only had one experience of contact with a recruiter when like yourself i was trying to find a very specific position (this time it was due to geographical constraints). I found an ad for a school posted on the site of a large recruiter and contacted that recruiter stating quite clearly that i was interested in that school and that school only. After a couple of weeks of asking for the contact details of that school i had nothing. What i did get from that recruiter was dozens of other offers of positions i was not interested in! Had that recruiter have been willing/able to give me the contact details for that school then i'd have been happy to have spoken to them and i would have based my decision on whether to join that school on what the school themselves had said and not anything the recruiter promised (to many vested interests).

My guess is that the recruitment agencies have different deals with different schools. The position i was looking at didn't start for another 4months however, the ones they kept sending me were immediate starts! They were just looking to fill positions.

I guess the morale of the story is if you can ge what you want from them then there is no reason to completely avoid recruiters but you just have to be very careful in the meantime and base any decision you make on actual contact with the school rather than vague promises from the recruiter.