Scottish education continues to operate in a very challenging financial climate, right across the country. Budget cuts in recent years have been painful, leading to fewer teachers and support staff in our schools, and less support and fewer opportunities for our young people.

The Scottish Government has, rightly, set its sights on the eradication of child poverty as a key target. Our schools are playing, and will continue to play, an extremely important role in achieving this objective – but schools cannot do this in isolation, and they cannot do it without sufficient support and investment, most critically in respect of staffing resource.

Quality education cannot be provided on an equitable basis to all young people if there are insufficient numbers of teachers to provide it.

The damaging impact of poverty on young people was highlighted, and compounded, during the Covid pandemic, when young people from disadvantaged backgrounds were significantly more likely to suffer educational harm, or to disengage from education completely, as a result of the challenges that they faced.

Quality education cannot be provided on an equitable basis to all young people if there are insufficient numbers of teachers to provide it.

Sadly, however, the reality of declining education budgets and the reductions in the resourcing – including staffing – of our schools means that many of our most vulnerable young people are continuing to miss out on the support that they so desperately need to recover from the impact of Covid and a decade of austerity before that, the damage compounded by the shocks of the cost of living crisis.

In Glasgow, a city with the highest rates of child poverty and deprivation in the country, the local authority has embarked on a programme of deep cuts to the number of teachers employed in the city’s schools. The authority removed 125 posts in session 2023-34, has removed a further 172 for this schools session and overall is aiming to cut 10% of the teachers from the city’s schools by 2027, in an environment where there is simply no spare capacity to give. Cuts have already bitten to the bone.

Any additional teachers put into Glasgow’s schools to support educational recovery post-Covid, or to provide additional support to young people facing challenges associated with poverty, have now been subsumed into the core staffing complement in schools. They are no longer providing extra support. The reality is that if these teachers were not teaching classes full-time, there would be classes without a teacher and young people going untaught in Glasgow schools.

Education should never be seen as a cost to the public purse – it is not. It is an immediate investment in our young people

The national commitment to providing additional support to young people who need it remains in law, but there are simply fewer and fewer staff in schools and in the vital support services around schools, such as educational psychology, speech and language therapy, mental health services, available to deliver additional support to the 40% of young people who need it.

Class teachers will do what they can, of course, but the workload pressure of attempting to do this, while also having a full-time class teaching commitment with up to 33 pupils per class, and with support staff few and far between and who are under massive workload strain and work related stress, much of it arising from rising levels of violent and aggressive behaviour towards support staff and teachers alike, is unsustainable.

Like teachers, Glasgow’s parents are, rightly, horrified by the scale of the cuts and the impact that these are already having and will continue to have on young people. The EIS in Glasgow has been working with parent groups to oppose the Council’s programme of cuts. With a valid legal challenge to the plans having been thwarted, in large part as a result of lack of transparency around the local authority’s intent, the EIS has sought to take strike action to stop the cuts. A ballot for strike action was launched at the beginning of January, and was scheduled to close in early February, shortly after this SEJ went to print.

An unfortunate beginning to any new year but particularly one that the Scottish Government heralded would be the year that Scotland became a leading fair work nation where workers would experience voice, security, opportunity, fulfilment, respect. Suffice to say that Glasgow teachers are not feeling it, and Scotland’s teachers more widely are wondering when the Scottish Government manifesto promise of workload alleviation through class contact reduction will finally be kept.

So, where is the money to fund increased investment in education going to come from? The most recent UK budget promised an additional £5Billion to support public services in Scotland. In turn, the draft Scottish budget, announced in December, pledged a £15Billion funding package for Councils – an average increase of 6.5% in local authority budgets.

When signing up to receive this package, Councils also agreed certain conditions set by the Scottish Government, including some set national priorities for education. Amongst these is a commitment to not just preserve teacher numbers, but actually to return them to the levels seen in 2023. Some £187Million has been allocated to local authorities to support this objective. While this is welcome, the EIS hasn’t forgotten the Scottish Government’s manifesto pledge to increase teacher numbers overall by 2026.

In light of this tranche of additional funding and the budget agreement, the EIS has repeatedly called upon Glasgow City Council to confirm that it will halt, and reverse, its damaging programme of teacher cuts.

the EIS has repeatedly called upon Glasgow City Council to confirm that it will halt, and reverse, its damaging programme of teacher cuts.

Another local authority, Falkirk, which had outlined its own programme of cuts to both teacher numbers and the pupil learning week, backed down from its plans following the announcement of the draft Scottish budget. This begs the question as to why Glasgow seems to remain determined to push ahead with its damaging education cuts, despite the additional money allocated in the budget to make such proposals unnecessary. The Council needs to think again, and quickly, commit to halting what are now even more senseless cuts, and invest in Glasgow’s schools.

Of course, despite the increase in funding from the budget process, these remain challenging times for all public services, including Education. Education makes up the largest portion of council budgets, and for good reason – it is the most important public service that local authorities provide.

But Education should never be seen as a cost to the public purse – it is not. It is an immediate investment in our young people, and a judicious long-term investment in the future of the entire country. Countries which invest in education reap huge dividends in terms of economic prosperity and quality of life for their citizens.

This is what Scotland should be aspiring to, and this is why the Scottish Government and Scotland’s local authorities should be doing all that they can to support a high-quality education for every young person in the country. As the current EIS campaign states – we all, including our local and national politicians, need to Stand Up for Quality Education.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Herald Education HQ supplement