There is a discrepancy in the way primary and secondary schools are staffed that has been exercising the mind of headteacher Jonathan Cunningham for years. And at the conference of primary school leaders’ body AHDS in Glasgow in November, he decided to bring it to the attention of education secretary Jenny Gilruth.

Cunningham, who is head of Knightswood Primary School in Glasgow, as well as being AHDS vice-president, wanted to know why secondary schools have dedicated pastoral support and guidance teams while primaries - which face many of the same challenges - have no staff devoted to pupil support.

In practice, in primary schools this role falls to classroom teachers, heads and deputes, who must combine the pastoral side with everything else that they do. However, Cunningham wants his school to get extra staff, over and above the senior leadership team, dedicated entirely to this role, matching what happens in secondary schools.

That may seem far-fetched in the current financial climate, where cuts are the order of the day and school staffing approaches - which in Glasgow are mainly driven by deprivation and pupil numbers - are soon likely to become less, not more, generous: plans in the city to revise staffing formulae would result in the number of teachers falling by 450 in order to save £27.8 million over three years, as Tes Scotland reported this week.

Even if one primary school were to go out on a limb and create a specialist pastoral role similar to the long-established guidance teacher role in secondary schools, this would be akin to rearranging deckchairs and creating problems elsewhere, since Cunningham’s underlying point is that in the primary sector there are just not enough staff.

Cash-strapped local authorities would have to get behind the idea, but - regardless of the grim financial picture just now - Cunningham argues that the need for dedicated pastoral support is too important to ignore, and that prevention is better than cure. Spending money now to bolster primaries with specialist pastoral staff would, as well as supporting pupils, save money down the line by dealing with problems earlier, he says.

After all, adds Cunningham: “I don’t think any of us have ever had a conversation with our secondary heads who turned around and said, ‘You know pastoral care teams and guidance teams? They’re not worth their money.’

“Schools couldn’t run without them.”

The case for pastoral staff in primary

Cunningham’s school, which has a roll of more than 500 pupils, does run without them, despite being bigger than some Scottish secondaries.

“Secondary absolutely needs those people in place,” he says. But Cunningham’s point is that primaries need them just as much.

“As a three-person management team, you don’t have the flexibility to respond to things in the way you would like to.

“The plea that I made to the education secretary was basically to say that additional investment is needed so that we are able, in primary, to provide better support to pupils and teachers.”

He adds: “Early intervention when it comes to social, emotional and behavioural issues prevents things from escalating, but we don’t have those identified staff that have that role specifically.

“Nobody thinks inclusion is the wrong model - it just it needs to be resourced.”

The range of needs that primary teachers are having to deal with among pupils has grown massively in recent years - as it has in secondary.

‘Explosion’ in ASN numbers

The proportion of pupils with an identified additional support need (ASN) has gone from 5.3 per cent in 2007 to 37 per cent in 2023. Last week, at the first evidence session of the new Additional Support for Learning Inquiry, run by the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee, two witnesses described the increase in ASN numbers as an “explosion”.

One primary teacher who contributed to the recent “national discussion” on Scottish education helped to illustrate what this means on the ground.

In a class of 30, the teacher said, 12 pupils had identified ASN: four were autistic (one also had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression), three had longstanding separation anxiety difficulties and health professionals were involved, one was adopted, one had a difficult home life and had experienced trauma, one was a young carer, and two had severe learning difficulties.

A further eight also had “‘normal’ behind-track difficulties”.

The teacher said: “There is only one of me - I can’t give those 12 children enough of my attention to support their wellbeing, never mind their [needs] and the other 18 children’s learning needs...I know exactly what support each child needs but can’t split myself 30 ways to give them the individual attention they all need to be able to thrive.”

Differences in primary-secondary staffing

So, how does the staffing of Scottish primaries and secondaries differ? There is no national staffing formula in Scotland: how schools are staffed varies from one local authority to the next.

At Cunningham’s school, the roll is 516, according to the latest census. The school has a headteacher, two non-teaching depute heads and three principal teachers (PTs) with roughly half a day out of class to fulfil their PT remits.

By way of comparison, Castlemilk High School, which is also in Glasgow, has a roll of 452 pupils, according to the 2022 census. The school has a headteacher, three deputes and three principal teachers of pastoral care.

Overall, according to the Scottish government’s school information dashboard, Knightswood has 32 teachers and a pupil-teacher ratio of 16.1, while Castlemilk has 42 teachers and a pupil-teacher ratio of 10.8.

It is undoubtedly a crude comparison: primary and secondary schools are different beasts, organised in different ways.

Nevertheless, it helps to illustrate what Cunningham is getting at - he is not asking to be staffed on a par with secondary, but he wants the need for pastoral support in primary to be acknowledged.

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Argyll and Bute Council executive headteacher Peter Bain - who leads schools at both primary and secondary level - has sympathy with the case Cunningham makes.

The guidance teacher role in secondary has evolved over time, says Bain, who began his career as a history and modern studies teacher and is now head at Oban High School on the west coast of Scotland and both the primary and secondary on the island of Tiree.

It is generally accepted that the system of guidance teachers began in 1968 with publication of the Scottish Education Department’s paper Guidance in Secondary Schools. The basic aim of the guidance teacher system, according to a 1996 paper that offered one of the first historical overviews of guidance education, was to ensure that “each pupil knows and is known personally and in some depth by at least one member of staff”.

Guidance teachers’ expanded role

Initially, guidance staff retained a subject teaching role, but increasingly now, Bain says, these teachers - who are also known as pastoral care or pupil support teachers - no longer teach their discrete subjects and are dedicated to the guidance role because of the way it has expanded.

Guidance teachers provide careers guidance, support students with their subject choices, monitor attendance, deliver personal and social education lessons, liaise with parents and provide support to students. Lisa Finnie, president of the Scottish Guidance Association, says the need for pastoral support has never been greater - and she has been a guidance teacher since 1998.

Bain says primary pupils and their families face all the same pressures as secondary students. Also, like secondaries, primaries are experiencing more contact with parents these days, he says. This has largely come about because schools are more welcoming to families now, but when parents get in touch there must be staff available to respond; in secondaries, this duty often falls to guidance teachers.

“Both sectors need more pupil support assistants and pupil support officers”

Primary pupils also need personal and social education, Bain adds, and then there is the “increased level of violence and behaviour issues noted in the recent behaviour report in primaries”.

The longitudinal Behaviour in Scottish Schools research published in November 2023 found that, generally, behaviour gets worse as pupils get older - but the exception is physical aggression and violence. This is more common in primary schools than in secondaries, the research found, with P1-3 teachers most likely to encounter such behaviour.

Between 2016 (the previous year examined by the research) and 2023 the proportion of primary teachers reporting physical violence in the classroom once a week increased fourfold, from 3 per cent to 12 per cent.

In 2023, by contrast, just 3 per cent of secondary teachers said there was violence in the classroom once a week, up from 0 per cent in 2016.

Guidance teachers in primary?

So, should primary schools have guidance teachers?

Yes, says Bain, if the school is large enough to justify the staffing cost. He says a primary of 200 or more pupils would benefit from a dedicated pastoral care professional.

But he adds: “There are hundreds of smaller - indeed, many tiny primaries with fewer than 20 or 30 pupils - that would not warrant a dedicated guidance teacher.

“In such cases the headteacher, depending on their teaching commitment, should be able to provide the guidance role with suitable training.”

However, one teacher with experience of working in both primary and secondary questions how effective the secondary guidance teacher role actually is: guidance teachers have caseloads of 200 or 250 students, which this teacher, who wishes to remain anonymous, says is “completely ridiculous”.

An Education Scotland thematic inspection of personal and social education published in 2018 found that the average number of young people in a guidance teacher’s caseload was 200, with numbers ranging from 74 to 280 in the secondary schools visited.

Jehan Al-Azzawi, a transitions teacher working across Edinburgh primary and secondary schools, and Susan Quinn, a primary head and the EIS teaching union’s education convener, agree that more staff are needed but they do not see guidance teachers as the solution for primary.

Al-Azzawi says the guidance teacher role compensates for the much larger volume of students that secondaries and secondary subject teachers are dealing with.

“I don’t think it’s an advantage as such - it’s what’s needed in order to provide adequate pastoral support in a secondary setting.”

Need for more support in all sectors

However, she adds: “I would say more generally that both primary and secondary sectors currently lack sufficient support staff for dealing with ASN and pastoral issues - both sectors need more pupil support assistants and pupil support officers.

“More staff would always be welcome in both settings, but I don’t think secondaries are at a particular advantage here. Level of need might be the same but volume of pupils is quite different.”

Quinn acknowledges inequity in the way primary and secondary schools are staffed, but says it is there “for historic reasons”.

Primary schools do not need guidance teachers specifically, she says, but they do need more staff.

“At the moment in primary what we need is more staff to support additional support needs - so specialist ASN teachers, teachers to support nurture arrangements, and the commensurate support staff.”

Essentially, though, this is also what Cunningham is saying: primary leadership teams are struggling and they need more help.

“The dream would be to have enough pastoral support staff assigned to primary schools, based on their rolls, that gives somebody - or a team - the freedom and the time and the headspace to really respond to the needs of the child,” he says.

“Whether that’s early intervention, building trust, social skills development, transitions work or even early mental health support.”

He adds: “I definitely see my role as being in the middle of all that, but, as a headteacher, as well as supporting pupils, you are supporting your staff team - which here is 50 to 60 people - and taking calls from parents. Then there’s the quality assurance and the teaching and learning aspects of the role.

“When you have so many pieces of a jigsaw and you are trying to slot it together with just one person or a couple of people, another pair of hands would help that puzzle come together.”

Unions have tried all sorts of ways to make the case for more support in primary.

Research has exposed the long hours being worked by senior leaders, as well as the horrendous impact that working conditions are having on their health - not to mention the effect on the perceived attractiveness of the role.

It might be argued that Cunningham has found a new angle by highlighting an inequality between the sectors to a minister in a government that has “equality, opportunity, community” as its priorities.

Will this argument about pastoral staff, kickstarted at the AHDS conference in November, be the one that finally elicits a meaningful response?

That remains to be seen - but what is clear is that primary leadership teams are spreading themselves so thinly they fear not being able to meet everyone’s needs.

Emma Seith is senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

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