Hansard

::I will walk Alexander Burnett back to my comments in response to his colleague Roz McCall, in which I alluded to the fact that, when the probationer scheme was introduced in 2002, it was meant to be in addition to the staffing complement.

I hear the challenge that Aberdeenshire Council is facing, and I have met with it a number of times to discuss those issues. Aberdeenshire has benefited from the manual allocation of PWP probationers by gaining more probationers. However, probationers are meant to be in addition to the staffing complement. In the past year, Aberdeenshire Council was one of the local authorities that took additional funding from the Scottish Government to the tune of just over £9 million and chose to reduce teacher numbers.

I am also aware that Aberdeenshire Council is currently led by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, so there is a political incoherence between Alexander Burnett’s question—although I am sympathetic to that question—and the actions of his local authority, which have been to take the funding that I protected centrally in national Government and to cut teacher numbers. That is not a coherent approach. I would be more than happy to engage directly with the local authority on those issues, but we must remember that, when central Government protects funding for teacher numbers, communities should expect to see that play out in their communities. That is not what has happened in the case of Aberdeenshire.