Scotland has the best-funded education system in the UK, with the lowest pupil-teacher ratio and the highest starting salary for teachers, according to a new report.

A comparison of the UK education systems published today shows that spending per pupil is highest in Scotland (£7,300), followed by England and Wales (£6,100) and Northern Ireland (£5,800).

The report from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) think tank says: “Cuts to spending per pupil over the last 10 years have been largest in Northern Ireland (11 per cent), followed by England (9 per cent) and Wales (5 per cent). Cuts to spending per pupil in Scotland have been more than reversed with a net increase of 5 per cent since 2009-10, though most of this extra funding has been used to deliver higher levels of teacher pay in 2018 and 2019.”

Summary of school funding levels across the UK over time

Background: Progress on closing the attainment gap ‘limited’

News: Is Scottish education ‘stagnant and conformist’?

Innovation: What one thing would you change about Scottish schools?

Need to know: How much are teachers paid in Scotland?

The report also reveals that the pupil-teacher ratio is lower in Scotland in both primary and secondary. For example, there are fewer than 16 pupils per primary school teacher in Scotland, but more than 21 pupils for every primary school teacher elsewhere in the UK.

UK comparison of pupil-teacher ratios in primary 

And in Scotland new teachers started on a salary of £27,500 in 2020-21, whereas in Wales the teacher starting salary was £27,000, in England (excluding London) it was £25,700, and in Northern Ireland it was £24,000.

Scotland ‘has the most school funding per pupil in the UK’ 

However, while a central aim of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was to give teachers more control over what they teach, that is not the perception of Scottish school staff.

The report states: “Policy intentions about control over the curriculum do not always match with teacher perceptions...The perceived role of teachers in shaping course offerings and content is lower in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, with a large perceived role for national and local government.”

In Scotland, individual schools also have considerably less say about how funding for education is spent, and the report says that “it seems highly likely that the English school funding system allocates more funding in total on the basis of social deprivation than occurs in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland”.

Headteachers of schools serving disadvantaged areas in Scotland are also among the most likely in the UK to report that they struggle to secure staff, with 45 per cent of heads in schools based in disadvantaged areas of Scotland saying they suffer from a lack of teaching staff, compared with 25 per cent of heads based in advantaged areas.

The report also describes Education Scotland as “a novelty in the UK” because it has “responsibilities for school improvement, the curriculum and for inspecting schools”.

“In the rest of the UK,” says the report, “the agency responsible for inspections is kept separate from those responsible for school improvement and the curriculum.”

However, while the report states that there has been “a gradual divergence across all four nations of the UK on schools policy” since devolution in 1999, it is less clear about what the impact of this has been on outcomes.

It says investigating the impact of the differing policies “is a significant challenge” because it requires “consistent data across the four nations on education attainment and skills” and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) international comparison of teenagers’ performance in reading, science and maths - the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) - is the “only real source” at present.

The fact that Pisa “only happens every three years and only relates to 15-year-olds are obvious drawbacks”, says the report.

However, whilst England has performed “close to the OECD average over time”, scores in Northern Ireland and Scotland “have fallen back” and scores in Wales “have fallen well below the OECD average, with some slight recovery in more recent years”.

One of the report’s authors, EPI research fellow Luke Sibieta, told Tes Scotland: “It’s clear that the resources to schools are higher in Scotland than the rest of the UK. We can see that in terms of the funding per pupil and lower class sizes, so that’s pretty good news.

“But we do know that Scotland does not do so well, and is getting a bit worse every time, when it comes to Pisa.

“There are also some interesting challenges there around the curriculum. Curriculum for Excellence was meant to give more control to individual teachers over the curriculum but still in Scotland headteachers think that national and local government plays the biggest role in shaping the curriculum.”