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Highland pupils could lose out claim in budget cuts





Budget leader Maxine Smith
Budget leader Maxine Smith

Shortening the school day by half-an-hour will leave Highland youngsters trailing behind their counterparts in other parts of the country and could see them lose out in the race for university places, a Highland primary school teacher has warned.

Children in the region would miss out on three terms of schooling over their seven years in primary school, subjects like PE, art and music taught by visiting specialist teachers would be dropped and teaching posts would be lost, she said.

The proposal is on a consultation paper launched by Highland Council which details proposed savings for more than £15 million towards a total budget cut of £64 million over the next five years.

The grant the council receives from Scottish Government continues to reduce due to inflation and increasing costs and is not expected to increase over the next four years.

Budget leader, Cromarty Firth councillor Maxine Smith, said a previous consultation showed public opinion was "generally reasonably positive" on the plan to reduce the school day for all primary pupils by half-an-hour per day - down to 22-and-a-half-hours per week.

The primary school teacher, who has asked us not to name her for fear of being reprimanded, is appealing to parents to reject the plan or risk ruining their children’s education.

She said: "If our primary school children get half-an-hour a day less in school that means that by the end of P7 the will have missed out on three terms of schooling that children living in Moray or Aberdeen and other parts of Scotland have had.

"And if our secondary schools keep reducing the number of subjects for pupils in S4 and above our children will continue to be disadvantaged all through their school years and what we’ll see in future is pupils from other areas getting all the university places. How can we sit back and let that happen to our children?"

Our teaching source claimed the local authority had not been up front with parents about the long-term effects shortening the school day could incur, claiming the budget consultation paper underplayed the "enormous consequences" of the move.

She added: "Probably not may people know that children in Highlands are already receiving less education than children in other parts of the country.

"Here in Highland, we do a 22-and-a-half hour week for the infant pupils in P1 to P3, compared to a 25 hours a week for pupils that age in schools in Glasgow, Aberdeen and other areas.

"If we lose the half-hour per day we will lose all our special visiting teachers who deliver areas of the curriculum, which means that we will have to take on that burden but still have shorter week to do it in. A class teacher will be expected to deliver specialist skills like music and PE.

"But a specialist PE teacher, because they have slightly more freedom, can take groups of children to cross-country or to athletics whereas a class teacher, if they’ve got a class all day, can not. The whole enriched curriculum pupils benefit from is gone. There are huge implication for the wider learning of pupils."

Council budget leader Maxine Smith said the shortening of the school day is a ‘misnoma’.

She commented: "It does not mean that the school will close earlier, it means, in most cases that the lunch break will be slightly longer, maybe 20 minutes and the morning break will be an extra 10 minutes.

"It means that the pupil loses 2.5 hours per week of teacher contact time and has more time to play. There are many learning environments and play is one of them. Many authoritative figures would argue children do not play enough.

"The council are statutorily obliged to provide 22.5 hours per week teacher/pupil time and this is what we could do under this proposal.

"People must realise all things and services have to change in order to balance this budget. The council would prefer not be doing this but unless the UK Government decide to give more in the block grant to Scotland we have to make these cuts – we cannot change that ourselves. "We are looking at ways to maximise our income but the fact is that we receive 80% of our funding from Government.

"All councils are in this position, we are not alone. The consultation is about impact when the facts are known but I am not convinced that the public are in full awareness of the little change it would make to the primary schools in the end."

The local authority has already achieved savings of £77.7 million of cuts over the last five years. This included shedding 44 management posts to save £3.25 million.

Director of finance Derek Yule has warned education can no longer be spared.

Care and Learning has the biggest spending of the five council services, with a budget of £373 million, more than half of the council’s annual spending. It has 7,500 employees, which includes 2,700 teachers.

Mr Yule said: "We can’t keep chipping away at services and finding one per cent here and there. We have come to a point where we have to consider a real reduction in services."


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