Scotland’s largest teaching union is warning ministers they could be responsible for the “Anglicisation of Scottish education” and the creation of “academies-light” if they push ahead with plans to give headteachers more power and money.
The Scottish government has long ruled out introducing England’s academies system, which allows schools to opt out of council control and receive their funding direct from government. However, it has made it clear it wants more decisions to be taken at school level and that it believes the way funding is allocated to schools by councils currently is “complex, opaque, and varies widely between local authorities”.
Now, however, the EIS teaching union is claiming the government “is in danger of creating schools with the same characteristics as academies”, in terms of reducing local-authority power and increasing headteachers’ powers, describing this prospect as “academies-light”.
‘No oversight’
The union also says the SNP’s proposals for how schools should be run and funded in the future “go beyond the powers that headteachers have in academies in England” because the government is considering “additional powers to headteachers and no governing body oversight”.
The EIS warns “the bad governance” in the college sector - where one college’s senior management team was accused by a parliamentary committee convener of “an appalling abuse of the public purse” - could be repeated in the school sector.
The government has not “provided a convincing rationale for change to the current funding structures”, says the EIS, although it acknowledges the current system can be improved.
If headteachers are given bigger budgets the EIS is calling for “School Finance Committees” to be formed. These would draw their membership from the entire school community and relieve “headteachers of the solitary burden of making unilateral decisions”.
Cosla concerns
Council umbrella body Cosla, meanwhile, also says it has “serious concerns about accountability for public money if more power is to be devolved to headteachers”. It warns that there is a “real risk” the attainment gap will widen “by taking a school-based and not whole-system approach to funding”.
The EIS and Cosla made their warnings in their submissions to the government’s consultation on how schools should be funded in the future, which closed last month. Tes Scotland has obtained exclusive access to the organisations’ responses to the consultation - as well as the responses submitted by primary and secondary headteachers’ organisations, the Association of Headteachers and Deputes in Scotland (AHDS) and School Leaders Scotland (SLS).
Responding to the EIS comments about the dangers of devolving more power and money to heads Jim Thewliss, general secretary of School Leaders Scotland, said “nobody has any appetite for mirroring or duplicating the English system” and “no headteacher wants a situation where financial accountability is not in place”. In its submission to the consultation, SLS calls the current arrangements for funding schools “irrelevant”, “opaque”, “unfit for purpose” and “inequitable”.
AHDS, meanwhile, highlights the general “shortage of funding in schools at present”, adding that even the best system for devolving funding to schools “will not overcome this”.
A Scottish government spokesman said the consultation on school funding had attracted 94 responses. An analysis of the consultation responses was being undertaken and the government would publish its response “in due course”, he added.
This is an edited version of an article in the 3 November edition of Tes Scotland. Subscribers can read the full story here. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here. Tes Scotland magazine is available at all good newsagents.
Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and Instagram, and like Tes on Facebook
