Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross plans to spend £550 million on 3,000 more teachers for Scotland if his party gains power at the Scottish Parliament election in May 2021.
He is outlining the policy, a manifesto pledge, in an online event for parents and teachers this morning.
The party said the pledge for 3,000 teachers would be paid for “through Barnett [formula] consequentials from the UK government’s levelling-up strategy and the savings from delivering key projects on time”.
In a statement marking six years since the Scottish independence referendum on 18 September 2014, Mr Ross said: “Before the pandemic, Scotland’s schools were struggling from the SNP cutting teacher numbers by nearly 3,000.
Coronavirus: Schools ‘don’t have enough teachers’
“Multi-level teaching was rife and subject choice cuts were limiting pupils’ ambitions.
“Those avoidable tensions are now ramping up. There are not enough teachers to deliver smaller classes and meet the demands of absences related to Covid.”
Teacher numbers: Primary teacher numbers at highest in over a decade
Background: Probationer teacher numbers
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Coronavirus: The search for extra teachers
Scottish government figures show that in 2007, the year the SNP came to power, there were 55,089 full-time equivalent teachers. By 2014 this had fallen to 50,814, but the most recent statistics, published in 2019, show a rise to 52,247.
In July the Scottish government announced funding for hiring 1,400 additional teachers, but last month the EIS teaching union said an extra 3,500 would be needed in Scotland to allow for physical distancing amid the coronavirus crisis.
A Scottish government spokesman said: “Teacher numbers are the highest in a decade with the number of primary teachers the highest since 1980.
“We have provided £80 million to local authorities, enough to recruit around 1,400 additional teachers and 200 support staff, in order to bring much-needed resilience to the education system and to compensate for any loss of learning suffered by children and young people during lockdown.
“Local authorities are still working through their recruitment processes, and current estimates suggest that an additional 1,118 teachers have already been recruited, with plans in place to recruit another 250.”
