The UK’s first ever Budget delivered by a female chancellor signalled a material change in the UK approach to public finances - a well-trailed approach, but a big change nonetheless.
Something that Budget watchers will know well is that there is often a significant difference between what appears to be promised and the implications for Scotland. I have no doubt that the Scottish government will see some of the figures differently than the despatch-box delivery would suggest.
However, if we take the statement that Scotland has been offered “the largest real-terms Budget since devolution”, then it seems safe to assume that the Scottish government will have some additional resource to put towards its priorities.
Within education, what should they be?
Alongside ensuring fair pay awards for staff, members of the primary school leaders’ body the AHDS have been very clear about what they see as the top priorities over successive annual workload surveys. Unsurprisingly, they are all interlinked.
ASN ‘top issue’ for primary heads
The top issue is proper support for pupils with additional support needs. This has been at or near the top of member priorities for several successive years. In this year’s AHDS survey, it was the number-one issue by a country mile.
Members are hugely supportive of ”Getting it right for every child” (GIRFEC) and of supporting pupils in mainstream settings whenever that is appropriate for the pupil concerned and the necessary resources are available. Sadly, over a number of years, these basic conditions for successfully delivering GIRFEC have been hugely eroded.
Another way of putting it would be to say that GIRFEC has been shouted from the rooftops, but chronically underfunded.
Aside from the impact on pupils who cannot be appropriately supported, and on their peers in the classroom, the lack of sufficient resource applied to GIRFEC leads to under-recruitment of the required staff and specialists, disaffection in the teaching profession and eye-watering drops in the levels of interest in becoming a school leader.
Yes, there are other factors, but at the heart of it is the gap between expectations and system capacity, which leads to more and more being loaded onto school leaders.
We have an attempt by a cash-strapped government to address elements of this with a well-intentioned action plan on behaviour and relationships. There is broad agreement about the system-wide issues it seeks to tackle, but the criticism widely levelled at the plan has been that the system needed more resource, not more guidance.
Resisting temptation of the new
So, if the UK government’s presentation of the Budget is a genuine turning of the page on the last 14 years of austerity, the Scottish government must resist the temptation of new initiatives or additional policy interventions. (That includes resisting the temptation to expand the inspectorate as it becomes independent - instead, we continue to believe that a more efficient systems-thinking approach is required.)
Instead, it must focus on rebuilding the foundations of an education system that delivers for all our children and values its workforce - it is that simple.
When you unpack what that means, it becomes more complicated, but my central point is that Scottish education knows what it needs to do. It needs investment to be able to deliver.
That means ensuring we have sufficient numbers of teachers - in nurseries and in schools - and school leaders released to do the job they are employed to do.
In turn, that means increasing the number of trained pupil support assistants, speech and language therapists, educational psychologists, home-school link workers, social workers, Cahms and so on, as well as increasing the number of specialist placements available for pupils who need them.
We hope that this Budget - and the Labour rhetoric of being honest about the problems faced and tackling them head-on - does indeed see a sustained increase in investment in education, starting with investment to make sure that the system can aim to meet long-held expectations and aspirations to genuinely implement GIRFEC.
By doing so, it may address many issues related to the attractiveness of the teaching profession and the manageability of school leadership roles.
Greg Dempster is general secretary of the Scottish primary school leaders’ body the AHDS
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