Meeting of the Parliament 30 October 2024
No, I am afraid not; I do not have time.
We need to rethink that approach; £145 million of public money was spent with the intention of resulting in more teachers, but we ended up with fewer teachers at the end of that first financial year. I do not think that that is all the fault of the Scottish Government. Councils have seriously undermined trust, but they are not the only ones that undermined the Verity house agreement; the Scottish Government clearly undermined it with the council tax freeze. We need to see all that in the wider context.
The issue here is threefold. Quite legitimately, the Scottish Government wants to protect teacher numbers and, quite legitimately, councils want to avoid having to make devastating cuts in other areas. Pam Duncan-Glancy mentioned support staff as an obvious example of that. However, the money does not exist to resolve both those challenges simultaneously. That funding question needs to be resolved in the longer term. The proposed Green amendment spoke to that, and I will come back to that later, but there is a much more urgent need to find a compromise now.
The first issue is a point of dialogue. The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities wants to declare a formal dispute, and the Scottish Government rejects that. To be frank, I think that that is a semantic point and I do not particularly care. However, there is a need for some kind of space for more dialogue.
COSLA has rejected the First Minister’s most recent response to it. It insists that the issues of teacher numbers, the national care service and the council tax freeze should be discussed together outside the annual budget process. As much as I have sympathy with the Scottish Government’s position, I think that showing some good will and, at the very least, agreeing to that discussion taking place outside the budget process might create the space for us to make progress.
Over the past couple of weeks, councillors in a variety of local authorities have raised with me another issue, as they were not sure whether this was an all-or-nothing position. If some councils were to fail to spend the money as the Government had prescribed, would the money be taken back from all councils? From what the cabinet secretary has said, that is not my understanding—I see that she is nodding. This is on a local authority by local authority basis. However, there is clearly a communication issue that is hampering any chance of reaching a compromise.
I return briefly to the impact of the pay deal, because we need to acknowledge that the same amount of cash simply will not pay for the same number of teachers as it did a couple of years ago. As some kind of compromise, the Government should be open to discussions about maintaining spend as opposed to maintaining overall teacher numbers. Compromise is possible and the Scottish Government should be open to one. I do not expect that we will hear about it in the debate, if for no other reason than the constraints of time. Local authorities will also need to show far more willingness to compromise than they have shown. At this point in time, something needs to give, and it is teachers and young people who are losing out unless we can come to some kind of agreement.
16:11