Meeting of the Parliament 28 May 2025
The figure of £145 million—now £186.5 million—should be enough to move every teacher who is on a temporary contract into a permanent role and to recruit hundreds more into permanent teaching posts on top of that. That sum of money was one of the more significant budgetary requests that the Greens made as part of the Bute house agreement. Our intent was clear—it was to grow Scotland’s teaching workforce. However, for several years, teacher numbers have not increased as planned.
Several factors have contributed to that outcome, including inflation eroding the value of the budget, and the teacher pay deal, which, despite being absolutely necessary, further constrained spending flexibility. The same amount of cash from three or four years ago does not go as far as it used to, especially in education. The same amount of money will not recruit the same number of teachers as it once would have done.
Something clearly went wrong, given that the original £145 million to increase teacher numbers was there, yet we had fewer teachers at the end of the first financial year. Of course, that is not all down to the Scottish Government. Many councils did not even touch their funding allocation for that purpose. The reasons behind that situation are entirely understandable and boil down to three points: the Government wants teacher numbers to increase, councils want to avoid making cuts in departments other than education and the money to do both just is not there—or it is not there in the volume that is needed. That funding question needs to be resolved in the medium to long term, which is why this issue, as so many do, boils down to finance.
Of course, there are things that the Scottish Government can and should do now. The most obvious is a council tax revaluation. In principle, that appears to have the Parliament’s support, but in practice it does not. Councils having far more autonomy over their finances and the power to raise revenue would enable them to make longer-term decisions that should reduce the reliance on Government top-up to prop them up when it comes to workforce planning.
We come back regularly to workforce planning in the Parliament, as Pam Duncan-Glancy highlighted. In many ways, it is an easy issue to bash the Government over the head with, but that approach has not got us anywhere. Something in the tension between the Government and COSLA has to give. The conflict in education that we constantly battle with is the premise that education is a national issue on which the Government is judged, when local authorities are the ones that are tasked with delivering that education.
There is a clear need for dialogue on funding in schools. There is a need for the Government and COSLA to show good will to each other and to act in good faith. Yes, it is valid for the Government to be frustrated at local authorities for spending hundreds of millions of pounds with no clear outcome. As much as I have sympathy for the Government on this, COSLA is also right to argue that teacher numbers, the national care service and the council tax freeze—to name just a few examples—are things that should be discussed outside the budget process, because they do not involve just budgetary decisions. As has been mentioned, we need the overall strategy and partnership working. Without reforming how councils are funded and how education is planned nationally, we will keep repeating the cycle of failed delivery over and over again.
Teachers and young people are suffering, as Willie Rennie highlighted so clearly in his opening speech. Compromise is possible, however, and we can all see a way forward, but everyone has to be willing to work together in good faith to get to that place, where we have the right teachers in the right place, supporting all our young people as we know they can.
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