A £29 million plan for additional support needs (ASN) has been announced in the Scottish Budget this afternoon.
Finance secretary Shona Robison - in a Budget statement that she said was primarily focused on reducing poverty - also announced a scheme to expand school breakfast clubs, called Bright Start Breakfasts.
However, Ms Robison did not make a fresh commitment to expand free school meals - currently offered to all P1-5s - to P6-7 pupils, despite this previously being a key commitment for this 2021-26 parliamentary term.
Asked why at Holyrood today, Ms Robison said the government had to make choices and the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap - the key announcement from today’s statement - “wins every time” in terms of impact.
She also faced criticism that any good news about education had to be placed in the context of a “huge” reduction in funding for schools.
Scottish Budget: funding for ASN support
Ms Robison said she had heard from education secretary Jenny Gilruth about “the challenge that many children face with ASN”.
“I’ll therefore fund a £29 million ASN plan, delivering measures like training so that more of our teachers can become ASN teachers,” the finance secretary said.
In November the education secretary suggested in the Scottish Parliament that out-of-work primary teachers could train as ASN specialists, an idea that prompted angry reactions from primary teachers who had been struggling to find work in their sector.
Ms Robison also said today that the Budget would “maintain teacher numbers at 2023 levels and continue improvement in the school estate”, pointing to plans for “state-of-the-art schools” in areas such as Shetland and the Borders.
This year the government’s commitment to ensure that teacher numbers do not drop has been a major source of tension in its relationship with local authorities.
Meanwhile, there was no explicit mention in the Budget of the 2021 SNP manifesto commitment to reduce teachers’ class-contact time by 90 minutes a week.
Yesterday the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers’ (SNCT) teachers’ panel issued a statement warning that unless a “very clear plan” emerges on how to make the policy happen, teachers’ patience will run out.
The panel said that a formal dispute could begin over the promised reduction in teachers’ class-contact time if there was no sign of the policy being kickstarted in the Scottish Budget.
New school breakfast clubs scheme
On free school meals, Ms Robison used her Budget statement this afternoon to reiterate a previous commitment, saying she would work with local authorities’ body Cosla to “expand free school meals to Primary 6 and 7 children from low-income families”.
She added: “But we are determined to go further still. I can announce today that we’ll fund a new initiative that will deliver more breakfast clubs in primary schools across Scotland, to be called Bright Start Breakfasts, that will make things that little bit easier for working mums and dads, while also giving more of our kids a better start to their day.”
But the Scottish Greens’ education spokesperson, Ross Greer, said that “this Budget contains a huge cut to core council services like schools and social care”.
Scottish Labour’s finance spokesperson, Michael Marra, said the Budget “amounts to more of the same, sending Scotland ever faster in the wrong direction”, with “schools falling further behind”.
EIS union responds
The EIS teaching union cautiously welcomed aspects of today’s Budget.
EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley said: “Although on the face of it a disappointing statement...on closer inspection, it would appear that there may yet be hope that the SNP government’s existing manifesto commitments to recruit 3,500 additional teachers during the term of this parliament, and to reduce teachers’ maximum class-contact time during this period, have not been completely abandoned.”
Ms Bradley added: “There was welcome mention of the challenging situation related to ASN provision in our schools, with the creation of a fund to provide teacher training in ASN support. While this is welcome, it does appear to be focused largely on the retraining of existing teachers, rather than the employment of significant numbers of additional teachers in our schools.”
She said that more teachers were needed or such measures would merely be “a sticking plaster on a gaping wound”.
“Positive elements” in the Budget included: some extra funding for the early years, “which we hope will include the recruitment of qualified teachers”; money for school buildings; initiatives to tackle poverty by removing the two-child benefit cap; and extra money for school breakfast clubs.
But Ms Bradley criticised the lack of progress on the commitment to expand universal free school meals.
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