Ahead of the budget next week, the country’s largest teaching union, The EIS, is demanding that the Scottish Government must commit the necessary funding to the sector so that its promises on education are kept

With the Scottish budget now imminent, it is time for Scotland’s politicians to deliver on the promises they have made to Scottish education, our schools, our young people and 
our teachers.

Scotland’s schools are currently under-funded, with serious implications for the learning experience of young people across the country. The damaging impact of austerity and the Covid pandemic is still being felt in our classrooms, with many young people still struggling to overcome the profound impact these events have had on their learning.

Schools were promised a whole array of additional resources to support young people in their education recovery. To all extents and purposes, this promised additional support has completely failed to materialise to any significant degree.

We currently have more young people with an identified Additional Support Need (ASN) in our classrooms than ever before. Nationally, almost 40% of young people have an identified ASN, with the figure even higher in some school communities. These young people need, and have a right to, specialist additional support – but too many are just not getting it.

Budget cuts have led to a sharp decline in the number of specialist staff available to support young people with ASN. This is extremely frustrating for the young people concerned, and this frustration can lead to young people becoming ever-more disengaged from their learning.

Sadly, that frustration can also manifest itself in other ways – including through violent and aggressive behaviours against other pupils or members of staff. Assaults on teachers – of course, not all of them by young people with ASN – are reaching epidemic proportions in our schools. 

The First Minister recently spoke out against an upsurge in violent incidents against bus drivers. Rightly so, as no-one should ever face such physical threat in their place of work. However, the sad reality is that assaults against teachers happen every day in Scotland’s schools.

Perhaps people think that an assault is less harmful when it is enacted by a child or young person– but that is just not the case, as the long list of criminal injury cases dealt with each year by teaching unions can attest. Put simply, work shouldn’t hurt – and teaching our children and young people shouldn’t hurt.

Workload for teachers is through the roof, with a growing number of teachers experiencing work-related stress and stress-related injury as a result. The combination of fewer staff, large class sizes, and the huge increase in the number of pupils with ASN are piling ever more workload onto our teachers. 

Teacher burnout is a real issue, with greater numbers of highly-experienced teachers choosing to leave the profession early, for the good of their health.

Where experienced teachers leave, they are often replaced – if they are replaced at all – with a recently qualified teacher, many of whom are placed on short-term and temporary contracts. This creates uncertainty for teachers, and instability for pupils, with many young people experiencing an unsettling degree of turnover in who is teaching them throughout the school week.

Scotland needs more teachers in its schools to help address all of these issues. There was broad political consensus on this issue ahead of the last Scottish Parliamentary election, with each of the main Holyrood parties making commitments on education which included the recruitment of additional teachers.

The SNP, the current party of government at Holyrood, made a commitment to recruit an additional 3,500 teachers during this Parliament. Not only has this promise not been delivered, but teacher numbers are actually declining across the country.

In Glasgow, the Council is proposing a reduction of 450 teaching posts over three years, and has already started its programme of cuts. In Falkirk, the Council is similarly proposing significant cuts to teacher numbers and is, also, planning a 10% cut to pupils’ learning time in school – purely as a cost-saving measure.

In areas where levels of disadvantage and poverty are already high, such savage cuts would have a hugely damaging impact on the life chances of thousands of young people. The Councils say they need more money from the Scottish Government, the Scottish Government argues Councils have enough to deliver their commitments. And young people are caught in the middle, as local and national government squabble over who is to blame for the damage being done to Scottish education.

The Scottish Government has made a further promise to address teacher workload, by reducing teachers’ class contact time to a maximum of 21 hours per week. Scotland’s teachers currently have amongst the highest teaching hours commitments in the world. 

With not enough time in the working day to fit in all their workload, Scottish teachers are propping up the system with over 11 hours of unpaid work, on average, each and every week. Teachers’ unpaid labour is massively subsidising our education system, which is neither fair nor sustainable.

Like the additional teachers manifesto commitment, there is currently no sign of the promise on class-contact being delivered either.

Education is the bedrock of every civilised society. The learners of today are the citizens and the workers of tomorrow, and the availability of a highly-educated, highly-skilled workforce is one of the key drivers of any nation’s economy. But you cannot will the ends without first delivering the means – education needs investment to deliver positive outcomes for learners and for society.

The recent UK budget promised almost an additional £5 billion in funding for Scottish public services over this year and next. 

In setting its own budget on December the 4th, the Scottish Government must commit the necessary funding so that its promises on education are kept. The EIS believes that this money should be ring-fenced to ensure that government promises on additional teachers and class-contact reductions are delivered, allowing challenges such as enhancing ASN support, reducing violent incidents, and reducing teacher workload to be addressed.

Political promises are still promises – and Scotland’s learners and teachers, parents and voters fully expect the promises made to them by the nation’s politicians to be kept.