Mainstream media outlets have recently been covering budget cuts in education, initially reported in Tes Scotland, focusing on planned teacher cuts in Glasgow City Council (GCC).
In response to concerns raised by parent groups, the EIS teaching union and [primary school leaders’ body] the AHDS, the council has been quoted as saying that information being shared is “inaccurate and alarmist”.
While it is not at all clear whose comments GCC had in mind, I can say with absolute certainty that AHDS members are being neither inaccurate nor alarmist, as has been suggested. They are simply raising very genuine concerns about the council’s plans.
Let’s work through the facts and what AHDS has said so far.
The council recently agreed its budget for 2024-27. Teacher cuts did not feature in the savings detailed for education services.
Cutting teacher numbers
It then became clear that the heading “service redesign and future income generation’, amounting to more than £31 million over the budget period, included education savings expected to be almost £28 million.
These savings were to be achieved largely by cutting teacher numbers in each of the three years; around 450 teachers are to be shed over the three-year period.
AHDS members, making up almost 90 per cent of primary headteachers in the city, have been presented with more information at different stages, which has concerned them greatly.
For the first year (that is, effective from after the 2024 summer break), they have been told the staffing cut they will have to manage and have been asked to plan how their classes will be staffed. The result for many is that the headteacher will be the only non-class-committed teacher in the building.
The result would be that all the duties currently undertaken by the management team would fall to the head.
Ignoring the vast number of duties undertaken by depute heads (DHTs) and principal teachers (PTs) and looking only at two factors covered in our annual workload survey, you start to get a picture of how impossible that will be.
In our 2024 survey, Glasgow DHTs reported spending an average of 7.6 hours a week providing one-to-one support for pupils who have been removed from class. For PTs, the average was 4.5 hours per week.
In the same survey, DHTs reported spending a weekly average of 3.1 hours on unplanned class cover; for PTs, it was 3.6 hours. So, in a primary with a DHT and PT no longer able to cover these average commitments, some other way to cover 17.9 hours of work per week would need to be found or some pupils may need to be sent home.
Little slack in heads’ working week
In case you think that there is slack in the working week of Glasgow heads, it is worth noting that they already report working an average of 56.5 hours a week (a whopping 21.5 hours a week more than contracted working hours).
A local survey of AHDS members highlighted concerns about the impact of the planned cuts. These concerns, shared with the directorate, were very practical and related to issues such as:
- the likely impacts on attainment;
- difficulty providing the required level of support to children displaying distressed behaviours or with additional needs;
- the likelihood of increased pupil exclusions;
- the increase in workload for school leaders (either through teaching commitments or because other members of the team would be teaching);
- safety concerns for staff and pupils owing to the reduction in available management team members to deal with incidents;
- reduced management time available to engage with parents and for external meetings relating to individual pupils or council-wide priorities;
- reduced capacity to support professional learning;
- and the survey report then went on to look at the support and service changes that would be required if the cuts to teacher headcount went ahead.
So, if the group charged with managing the planned cuts in schools explaining the likely impact of those cuts and suggesting things that would need to change as a result is “inaccurate”, that can only be because the cuts have not been communicated properly.
Members will be delighted to hear further details if they have misunderstood the scale of the cuts.
Heads best placed to assess impact of cuts
Furthermore, for the council to brand the highlighting of these concerns as “alarmist” is itself alarming. After all, who is better placed to assess the impact of cuts to school staffing than the leaders who run those schools on a daily basis?
Alongside the measured response from members in the survey returns, discussions I have had paint a starker picture: one that I have described as presenting a seismic change for education in Glasgow and as catastrophic.
Instead, the council would have us believe it will be business as usual in schools - I know whose judgement on this I think is misleading.
Greg Demspter is general secretary of the primary school leaders’ body AHDS
