Over the last few months, The Herald has covered Glasgow City Council's plans to cut up to 450 teaching posts in an effort to fill an enormous budget gap.  The cuts have already begun, with new staffing formulas applied to schools across the city, amidst warnings from teachers and parents groups of an impending 'state of disaster' in the city.

Education writer and former teacher speaks to Greg Dempster, General Secretary of the Association of Headteachers and Deputes Scotland, about the impact of the council's plans. The AHDS represents more than 90% of primary school headteachers in the city.

 

When did Glasgow headteachers find out about the scale of the cuts that were going to be imposed on schools?

The nature of the cuts was not fully clear until the headteacher meeting on 12 March, when Heads were asked to work out their staffing requirements for 2024/25.  This highlighted that, for most schools, all members of school management teams apart from the headteacher will be in class full time.  In a small number of schools, headteachers may also have allocated class teaching time each week too.

Questions still remain about the formula as it had not been provided to them.  They weren’t clear if EAL allocations would be impacted nor were they clear about any impact or change to how teachers’ non-contact time would be covered.

 

So schools know that things are going to change but don’t necessarily have all the information as to why?

Headteachers have been told what their staffing changes will be but they do not know the formula used to arrive at those allocations.  The full formula has not been shared with them.  Clearly, they are keen to see and understand that formula.

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Even without seeing the actual funding formula, do we have an idea of the impact of the cuts that the council is currently imposing?

The cuts planned for the coming year will result in a situation where deputes and principal teachers are in class full time and where headteachers will become first line cover for any absences.  At the moment this work is spread between headteachers and any deputes and principal teachers in the school. 

Similarly, where there is an incident in school, members of the management team are frequently called upon to support staff and pupils – this won’t be possible for members of the management team who have their own classes to cover, so all this will fall to headteachers when they are available.  Often, these situations require the involvement of more than one member of staff and it is not clear how this would be achieved.

 

It sounds like this is going to have a major impact on what staff like headteachers can actually do for their staff and pupils?

Inevitably, this will constrain headteachers’ capacity to do other work, particularly when we consider that our members in Glasgow report already spending around two pupil days per week either covering for staff absence or providing one-to-one support to pupils out of their classes.  The rest of their working week could quickly be used up performing these duties previously undertaken by other members of the management team.

This makes it much more likely that classes of pupils will be sent home due to staff absence or they will be excluded following incidents to create time and space to develop a sustainable response.

However, the issues don’t stop there. Seeking additional support for pupils with additional needs requires engagement with partners. School leaders will have reduced time available to do this, which will compromise their ability to attend multi-agency meetings and will lengthen the time required to get supports in place. These additional workload pressures also raise concern about school capacity to quickly and fully respond to safeguarding issues.

 

And I suppose there would also be consequences for work between schools across the city?

The cuts will increase pressure on the remaining teaching and support staff workforce as well as management.  Improvement, development, professional training, and engagement with work outside the school – with other headteachers in Glasgow or working groups for the city – will now be incredibly hard to schedule or justify because they will need to be available in case of absence or incidents.

Headteacher attendance at social work, child protection and multi-agency meetings will become extremely difficult which will mean that working to ensure appropriate support and provision for these vulnerable pupils will be increasingly difficult too. 

 

Obviously this will have been an incredibly difficult time for your members. What sort of impact has all of this had on them?

Members have been faced with uncertainty and questions about the changes from staff and parents but have been unable to offer any clarity or additional information beyond what had been reported in the media.  The agreed budget is opaque at best.  It offers no clarity to the profession or the public about the cuts planned for schools or the impact they will have.  Even now, there is not clarity about exactly what schools should or could communicate to parents and there are no centrally prepared communications that they can share with staff or school communities.

As a result of this, members are reporting elevated stress, sleepless nights and are talking about looking for other roles below headteacher level or in other local authorities.